unobserved either. The poet is observed by history, a lineage of poets who have come before him. But who is the poet’s guardian and protector? Fenton’s guardians in the poetic world are his British forefathers, Auden and Philip Larkin. The poet’s guardians are also his mentors, who can inadvertently hinder growth by protecting too much, dissuading the revolution of language with their safe and proven formulas.

Lines 17–20: In this stanza, the guardian tells the speaker to “take care,” that “not everyone is a friend.” The speaker muses about this and becomes discouraged; by being cautious of everyone and everything, his life becomes lonelier. The political revolutionary has no friends and trusts no one. To take care is good advice for the poet as well, who is in danger of losing himself to the viciousness of the business of poetry, the past glories, and the push toward the commercial. To be set apart, for the poet, as well as for the revolutionary, is also the making of loneliness. The guardians, the poets with their big reputations and styles and voices are restrictive as well as protective to the poet. Their voices are the ones that will push the speaker into himself, into the private rather than the public world.

Lines 21–24: This stanza transitions away from the people of the poem to a completely different scene. The conjunction “but” suggests that the animals in this stanza are connected to the previous stanzas, but how? The dogs, cats, and terns, each in their own turn act ruthlessly and slyly. It’s as if they are spies wearing masks. The traits of the sea are now absorbed by these creatures. As the terns move among the shallows, they show the fishermen where to catch those easy milkfish. The men must calculate according to what the terns tell them to do if they are going to catch anything. The revolutionaries watch the big politicos much as the fishermen watch the terns. The fisherman is also the poet watching the turns (or “terns”) of the audience, watching for anything that may point to some success. The terns as an audience tells the poet where to fish to get something that they, the audience, will eat. The audience, in other words, dictates the art. If the audience stays in the shallows, the art will too. The speaker eases up on the artist, seeing the artist as the one who is dictated to. If the art is shallow, it is because that is what the people want.

Lines 25–28: Here the fishermen act out fishing. They drag their lines until there is some activity, then cut the engines when they see something move so as not to scare the fish away. They are cautious fishermen much as the revolutionaries must be cautious so as not to draw attention to themselves. The speaker implies that the contemporary poet also follows the fishermen’s moves. The poet drags his poetic line, which can be quite beautiful as “a wide arch through the blue,” but cuts the rhythm and momentum of the poem, its engine, when he sees the first sign that it may be eliciting some reaction from the public. The contemporary poet doesn’t want to scare his audience away.

Lines 29–32: This stanza talks about the big fish, not the milkfish but the salmon that is caught in deep water; it is valuable and will fetch “a dollar a kilo,” “a prize.” The big fish is struggling not to die; but it will. The big fish for the Filipinos is the big revolutionary, the leader who carried within himself the big, valuable vision of a political future. In 1872, the idea of a revolution was first birthed. The revolution would die and come to life many times before being successful with the fall of Marcos. The poem implies that there is not a revolutionary capable of victory in the present circumstance. The big fish is also the vast, deep, and truly poetic poem. This rare and beautiful creature will fetch a lot, because there simply aren’t a lot of rare and beautiful poems with big, epic, poetic visions. This kind of poem will flourish and die many times; it will die for lack of an audience and lack of poets who can write such poems.

Lines 33–36: This stanza talks about making it big when the “improbable colours of the sea” fill up your boat and make you a fortune. For the revolutionary, it is going halfway, making a good show of revolution without committing all the way. For the poet, it means selling-out, shocking with language to make the big buck. The “improbable colours” for the poet are flashes in the pan, pretty trinkets without the gold—facades. This stanza marks the first time the poem’s gutsy refrain appears. “The spine lives when the brain dies / In a convulsive misery.” The line implies that the thing of value that was struggling in the previous stanza has died. The revolutionary ideal and the new fresh poetic voice have expired. The will for revolution has not died, but the means by which to make the vision real have passed for now. The line suggests for poetry that the will to write well thrives in the contemporary world, but the intelligence by which to write the revolutionary poem has dissipated.

Lines 37–40: In this stanza, the speaker introduces the Adams, the first namers of things, the people who took dares and risked danger to explore the world and name the things they found. These were magic people, “rummagers” who weren’t afraid to get dirty, “scourers” who weren’t afraid to get lost, and “dynamite men” who risked everything. Politically, these true historical revolutionaries are gone from the coast. There is only the stevedore and his wife running to fetch and carry. There are only people left to distrust. There are no risk takers or revolutionaries. This is suggestive of poetry as well. Here there are no Audens or poets like T. S. Eliot stretching the language, naming things through verse. The poet and the audience have become complacent, dictating each other’s mediocrity. The magicians have vanished.

Lines 41–44: The introduction of a foreign word into this stanza is the speaker’s attempt to be a dynamite man, to stretch the language, to define and engage it. It is also a daring political act. The smoking island “plumed from slash and burn” connotes the mountain of garbage, Smokey Mountain, that burned in Manila during the reign of Marcos. The burning garbage is, indeed, a sign of the Marcos regime, a time and place of rot, death, and decay. Humanity’s tendencies toward self-destruction are prevalent in this stanza. The little scavengers, the “hermit crabs,” are left the scraps of this destruction, the fruits of the halfway revolution. The poet is also only left scraps. If art is a reflection of society, then humanity’s various modes of self-destruction kill the poet as humanity kills itself.

Lines 45–48: The poem shifts to Mexico, here, and the mountain ranges of the Sierre Madre. In the 1800s, the Philippines were ruled by Spain but governed from Mexico. By crossing the world geographically, the poem tells the history of the Philippines. This geographical disembodiment also makes the poem a more universal object. The setting sun suggests an end to the political regime and injects hope into the scene. The sun that “projects a sharp blue line” across the sky is vibrant and hints that something fresh and new is returning, the poet’s blue lines from line 25. The other sun that might rise is also a sign of hope. It is a precarious hope framed in an “as if” statement but a hope nonetheless. For the poet, this suggests that poetry is not dead, but that a new voice is on the horizon, a revitalizing voice, a vibrant new vision.

Lines 49–52: The cycle of death, destruction, and resurrection appears in this stanza. The speaker cannot imagine a world in which there was always light and no darkness. The speaker implies there is a time and place for both, that this is the cycle of life. The current time is still dark and full of destruction, but the light will come. This is also the speaker’s rumination about the creative process, its low and high points. There can’t always be sunlight. The “pressure lanterns luring the prawns” can only lure the delicacies of the deep. The light must come from the dark. The prawn, the thing of value, must be lured from darkness. The prawn is the successful revolution that must be birthed in the dark times and lured into the light. Translated to the realm of poetry; there can be no renaissance without the dark ages. A new, vital poetry is birthed in ruble. The sea can take, but at some point the tide will turn, and it will give again.

Lines 53–56: The poem returns to the dark ages in this stanza. A glimpse was seen of the future world, but the current world is the one they live in, and in this world “nothing of value has arrived all day.” For the stevedore, this is bad news. For the speaker, it is bad news. But this return to the bleakest of realities is short-lived. A shark is washed up on the shore. This something of value arrives, and the people rush to it and are hungry for it. It is lured by a lantern, which is a small light. For the revolutionary, a small victory begins the quest for the larger victory. Each small victory is a light illuminating the path to success. For the poet and the revolution, the dark ages are still real, but every once in a while something of value arrives on the scene— an idea or poetic vision that is worth looking at. That something of value is greeted warmly by an audience; that is also an act of hope. The poem is a small light in the dark world.

Lines 57–60: In this stanza everyone is fed. Each person on the shore takes something home to eat. For the Filipino people, the small light was, perhaps, the beginning of the Cuban-American skirmish in 1898. It was this war that resulted in a short-lived Filipino freedom before the country was plunged into the darkness of dictatorship again. The people had a taste of what could be, and it was enough for everyone. This is true of a good poem as well. A good poem carries within it something for everyone. This shark, the good poem in a dark time, is aggressive; it has sharp teeth and foretells more sharp teeth. The “rows of sharks advancing along a jaw,” predict a string of valuable poems, a string of mini-revolutions, and a gradual return to better literary and political times.

Lines 61–64: In this stanza, the speaker is alone again. The brief gathering of community, the brief return of trust and value, has dissipated. The speaker is “alone by spirit light,” alone in his own vast world. If the shark was a thing of value for the whole community, what the speaker witnesses in this stanza is a thing of value for himself. This “real” vision, this valuable thing is the impetus for living, a fragile and precarious living. The thing bursting its skin is the idea of the revolution, the glimpse of the new life. It is the private vision, one that must be in place before the public revolution can occur. For the poet, the thing bursting its skin is the poet’s own voice being discovered. If the previous stanza was about poetry for all, this stanza is about poetry for one, the public versus the private.

Lines 65–68: In this stanza, there is a birth of something rare, vital, and fragile. It is a revolution for the speaker, a feast of senses in the “blue-green veins pulsing.” The creature has wings by which to fly, but “falls too soon.” It is not its time. The stanza suggests that the revolution is a highbred creature that has come too soon into the world. The people are not ready to receive it. This is also true for poetry. The new voice of poetry comes too soon and fades away again before returning stronger. Getting rid of former, stagnant selves is not easy. The stanza suggests that sometimes that isn’t all bad. If the world clings to a former self, then perhaps it is not time to give it up.

Lines 69–72: In this stanza, the new thing, the insect-shark, the new poetry, the revolution is cleaned up and tossed out. Any evidence that the new creature existed is carried away by “ants.” The alien being, the revolution, is too alien yet to be welcomed into the world of the human. The beginning line returns, the sea again sounding “insincere.” The big politicos have sentenced the revolution to death. The critics have sentenced the “insect-shark,” a new form and voice in poetry, to death.

Lines 73–76: In this stanza, the milkfish gatherers become “human fry.” It is ultimately up to them to sort the good fish from the bad. They are the worker bees, the ones left to sort out all the political fussing, the good political moves from the bad. The audience and the poet himself are also “human fry,” left to sort the good poems from the bad poems. Only a few are worth all the effort, the revolutionary ones.

Lines 77–80: In this final stanza, the milkfish is dissected and discovered to be just a pair of eyes, the current state of politics, just show, no substance. The contemporary poem is just a shocking image and nothing more. If we stretch the image of the eyes, we can speculate that the “eyes” are also Is and that the speaker is commenting on the trend of political leaders to serve for their own selfish reasons such as Marcos and his regime and the Spanish and Japanese that came before him. The Is also comment about current trends of confessional and selfindulgent poetry. These two Is or “eyes” carry out a shallow conversation with themselves. The refrain returns at the end to reiterate the will or the spine’s determination to revolt and embrace the “insect-shark” or the new life. It is a life of poetry as well. The revolution of politics and the revolution of linguistics lack, at this point, the intelligence to execute the will’s desire. This is the “convulsive misery,” knowing what is missing in the world but not having the talent or tools to make it appear.