Poetry

'The Water Sky' is an original poem and a song. I wrote the poem in 1979 and recorded it as a song for you! You'll find the link to the guitar and vocal version further on. It's sad and dark but accurately reflects my feelings about a relationship I had thirty years ago.

In the mid-70's I left home at lived in a large student house far away in the hills of Matlock in Derbyshire. The house was dilapidated and the skies hung like a grey tidal wave over the rooftops. I drove a van for a living and was quite poor. However, my girlfriend who lived in one of the flats on the floor above made meals and set them up in my hovel. We'd drink rosé wine by candlelight and our love made us rich. We married but sadly it didn't work out for us. I wrote this poem at the time which I've recently made into a song. It isn't very long but don't be fooled because there's plenty in it. I'll give you the poem first and then help with the images and their meaning at the end.

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The Water Sky
*******************

We sit together eye to eye
lost in labyrinths of love.
Upon our balconies we sigh,
overlooking blackness.

We learn each other in a dream,
floating softly face to face,
upon the mysteries of time,
across the distances of space.

The evening light is growing dim
and darkness closes over us,
lost in wine and shadows thin
beneath the water sky.

- Steven Newit - 1979
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Analysis:
************
Like most poetry, 'The Water Sky,' has hidden depths. :) Here's a line by line anaysis of the imagery and ideas in the poem.

Verse one:
**************

'We sit together eye to eye lost in labyrinths of love'.

That would be lovely if not for the 'labyrinths'. We're looking into each other's eyes, yes, but something is wrong. You can get lost in a labyrinth. People in love find something; they're no longer searching.

'Upon our balconies we sigh'

Like Juliet sighing for her Romeo and wishing things were different. It's a romantic play but it's a tragedy. We sigh with discontent. Look down into the night at the uncertainty of that balcony and we are:

'overlooking blackness.'

The room is lit and cosy like a balcony seen from shadows. Look out though. What can they see? Through the curtained windows of that bright room the surrounding hills, bleak skies and blackest unknowns are howling.

Verse Two:
***************

'We learn each other in a dream
floating softly face to face'

We make love in a surreal almost slow-motion state, there in that room that seems to exist out of all context. The bleak 'water sky' that hangs so grey over the rooftops is held back and, fragile as a candle flame, we exist in our alternative reality.

'upon the mysteries of time,
across the distances of space.'

All social context is ignored and we're together in the middle of timeless nowhere. How many people in love find solace in that moment despite the impossible odds that would spoil things if considered sensibly?

Verse Three:
******************

'The evening light is growing dim
and darkness closes over us,'

The moment is finite. It fades like the day, like a candle, like the relationship itself. We're almost floating in a sea of blackness.

'lost in wine and shadows thin
beneath the water sky.'

As the light of our love fades and the hour grows late you see us floating away in the shadows made longer by the setting sun, perhaps to drown?

Summary:
**************

What could have been an image of two people in love turns into something more menacing and foreboding. Dark uncertainties surround the charm of the moment. The lovers smile and the room is brightened. All the time, outside the window, outside their special meal and their romantic evening, the water sky lours down ready to crash like a tidal wave of blackness, destroying what they share.

It did.

~~~~~~~~~~

This my song lyric version reworked in the last week after all that time!
I've attempted to sing it for you too.

A free 3.2 MB download is here:

http://www.flamedruid.co.uk/mp3/watersky​.mp3

If you can save this onto your desktop it's better than streaming it I expect. I could make a button to facilitate that on my webpage if you get stuck. Let me know.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Water Sky
******************

We sit together eye to eye
lost in labyrinths of love.
Upon our balconies we sigh,
overlooking blackness.

You're my Juliet. (x4)

We learn each other in a dream,
floating softly face to face,
upon the mysteries of time,
across the distances of space.

My Cleopatra of tears and laughter.
My ever after. My Cleopatra.

The evening light is growing dim;
darkness closes over us,
lost in wine and shadows thin
beneath the water sky.

My Ophelia. (x4)

Thirty years and more have come and gone
since I looked at you through the wine,
since I tried to make you smile,
since I saw the twinkle in your eyes,
beneath the water sky. (x3)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Changes and explanations:
*********************************

The addition of the Shakespearean girls provides a chorus to break up and lengthen the performance.

Juliet? She looked like Juliet - the ill-fated ingenue who loved too much and too young.

Cleopatra? She also had long black hair and was also very beautiful;

Ophelia? Hamlet's unfortunate girlfriend who drowned.

The addition of the final verse exists simply to acknowledge in a statement directed across the decades to that once-young beauty how much time has passed. This is a happy reflection after the earlier sad verses because it takes the blackness and turns the light back on again. It returns us to the candlelit table, the wine, and love's young dream. If you don't look too hard at the reprised image in the very last line where the water sky is mentioned again you've just got the good times and the young lovers laughing over a meal in 1976.

Here's that link again if you want to hear the musical version.
http://www.flamedruid.co.uk/mp3/watersky​.mp3

An afterthought: there are two teenagers in my life who wouldn't exist today had this bitter-sweet episode ended well. I'd never have met their mother and they'd have never been born. From their point of view, then, the crashing down of the water sky was a blessing. If I could go back in time to put things right and take more care with that early love I wouldn't. Part of me would certainly want to - but I wouldn't.

Of course, a poem like this can be very personal and specific. This one is as it deals with a relationship from over thirty years ago. Yes, it is a snapshot of a room frozen in time, the two happy lovers lit by candles, looking into each other's eyes. However, if a poem is going to be any good it's going to offer more than that. It should hold a universal truth or some generally valid observation about life.

It does.

The two lovers are both on balconies - not just Juliet with Romeo in the garden below. Why? Because the balconies were like ship's railings. Although our two ships moved slowly together so we could laugh and look into each other's eyes for a while, they continued slowly on into the darkness of an uncertain future.

For me the experience was personal. For anyone reading the poem who has had a magical moment of love in their lives followed by a growing distance between them and their partner, my specifics will lead to their own recollections.

Many of us will have fallen in love and been full of hope only to see that hope washed away into shadows and memories. We arrive like ships on the ocean, our decks alive with lights and conversations, wave and smile at each other as we grow close, then our ships pass in the night and songs and poems like 'The Water Sky' are all that remain. They're our inner photo albums of happier times.

You'll have your own way of remembering such things. You'll have a favourite song or a special place that sets off your own memories. You can't take memories off people. Regarding my own personal one, that's why, thirty years on, 'The Water Sky' is something I murmur or even sing to myself in order to revisit that alum for a moment, to remember it as it was - not smeared and devalued by redefinitions from the perspective of who I became later - just as two young people having a meal, sitting 'together eye to eye, lost in labyrinths of love.'

Would an actual photo have been better? No. It would have been nice, I guess, but you can't photograph metaphors. The 'Water Sky' is complex. The actual body of the poem consists of three short verses. To imagine that this reflects it's entire merit or the limit of the poet's ability to write at any length would be an understandable error easily rectified by seeing the immensity of these supporting notes! Although what you see may be three short verses every word has been chosen, abandoned, reselected, redrafted and poked about until the images convey an exact feeling. It's what TS Eliot called 'an objective correlative'. This is no coincidental allusion as I'd just been studying 'The Wasteland' a few months before writing 'The Water Sky'.

What's an 'objective correlative'? It's the selection of images that are the exact formula of an emotion. Photographs can't do that though a good photographer who knows his trade might argue that a picture is worth a thousand words. Maybe, but in 'The Water Sky' the lovers are in a room and on the decks of two ships at the same time. They're also 'lost in labyrinths of love'. Snap that! Get a Polaroid, if you think you're hard enough, of the darkness closing over two lovers as the evening light grows dim and they're 'lost in wine and shadows thin beneath the water sky.'

So, what's the point? Where's the value of condensing all this into a shorthand formula of long passed emotions? Well, if we don't choose to remember the significant moments of our lives no one is going to do it for us. This multi-dimensional approach is my way. Do you think you could do it? Here are some questions to help you understand how tricky it is.

1. Should you? Is the past not better buried and forgotten. Might you offend or confuse people in your present by introducing in poetry or song people from the past?
2. Could you? Do you have the ability to use language as a tool so as to produce the 'objective correlative' that fits your own case?
3. Would you? Do you write poems or songs at all? If not then dealing with such memories and emotions is something you're unlikely to seriously attempt.

Additional notes and afterthoughts:
****************************************​*
'The Water Sky' has an almost psychotic coldness. The events described and the picture reproduced is dissected. There are dark reflections and shadows of foreboding. It is - you see - very unsentimental. Even though verse two describes passion and making love it actually goes on to describe floating and disassociation. Maybe the ships are on the dark ocean here. The existential link between these two lovers isn't as close as the poem suggests on the surface though.

Ogden Nash once wrote (and I knew this at the time I wrote 'The Water Sky')

"When flesh is linked with eager flesh,
And words run warm and full,
I think that he is loneliest then,
The captive in the skull."

Here's the whole thing:
http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poet​ry/Listen_by_Ogden_Nash_ana lysis.php

Although Ogden Nash was a comical poet best remembered for the way he'd outrageously stretch his lines out of all proportion to hilarious effect, this is a strikingly serious poem! The point it makes is exactly the point implied in 'The Water Sky'. Even when we're making love we're alone. We can be alone in a crowd and in the end we die alone. The illusion of companionship is a bright room frozen, surrounded by the growing blackness of time and the distances of space, and that whirling abyss doesn't exactly help the romantic mood!

Now, this psychotic coldness is all me. Another person might have written this poem in a warmer and more sentimental way. You might have got this reversal of all that negativity:

'The Warming Sky'
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We sit together eye to eye,
full of warmth and love.
Upon our balconies we dance,
laughing at our own romance.

We learn each other in a dream;
hearts of fire quickly race,
upon the breathless fields we fly
chasing, racing and embracing.

The morning light is growing bright
and bathes us as we float on high.
Laughing to defeat the night,
chasing through the warming sky.
_______________

I think this is more cheerful! If only I'd seen life that way at the time! Oh well, I didn't. How easy things are with hindsight! For me, the real poem is 'The Water Sky' and that's how I felt.

Having seen a few Lee Evans DVDs since then I've loosened up a lot. That, thinking about it, could be a great moral to be taken from 'The Water Sky.' Never look too coldly upon the world and the people you meet in it and wherever possible replace any objective correlatives you may think of with a funny walk and a 'monkey-boy' expression.

Lee Evans on an aeroplane:

'That's my seat!'
'I think you'll find it's mine!'
'I think you'll find it's mine!'
'I think you'll find it's mine!'
'I think you'll find it's mine!'
'Okay - you fly the bloody thing!'

That's where I'll end - somewhere positive with a back-slapping moral.

Something that makes you laugh and improves your mood may be just the thing to change your own 'Water Sky' into 'The Sunny side of the Street'.

FlameDruid 2007 flamedruid.co.uk