In the six years between the publication of the 'Essay on Memory' (1938) and 'The Face of the Waters' (1944) much of the optimism expressed in [FitzGerald's] earlier poems seems to have leaked away. Perhaps it was the war, or an older man writing, for, despite the optimistic ending of the poem, the main impression left in the mind of the reader is one of terror and incomprehension at the temporal system in which man is prisoner. It seems that FitzGerald's reading on causation and his predisposition toward determinism led him to the terrible vision which opens the poem…. Happily in this poem FitzGerald did not try to contain the argument in a strict form, but allowed his thoughts to find in irregular line lengths their most fitting cadences, and consequently, unlike the 'Essay on Memory', there is none of the feeling of competing systems of verse form and syntax in the poem. The diction is spare, but it has a fluency unusual for FitzGerald. The poem is a powerful and immediate experience, but once the reader begins to reflect on the meaning behind its sudden, brutal imagery and its terse diction, some of the immediacy dissolves in the struggle with abstract and difficult ideas. But … I believe it is the best example of FitzGerald's meditative powers. (p. 71)

'The Face of the Waters' is about the moment in time when from an undifferentiated multiplicity of futures one is made actual. The creation of this universe is the same kind of event as the next strike of type from my typewriter … and the poem makes use of this macrocosmic microcosmic parallel.

What may at first seem odd to the reader—why, after the title which so obviously alludes to the orthodox Semitic tradition of the Creation, does the poem start with the disturbing words 'Once again …'?—makes sense when we realise that FitzGerald sees in Aquinas' God of necessity, not only the original creator, but one who is present in every event. He continually produces the conditions by which only one or a few of those myriads of possibilities crossing the black granite will pass into the realms of actuality; His Creation is made over and over again every instant….

It is an extraordinary opening to the poem. The vivid concrete images of trap and harp, the black granite, the hordes with their soft pads invoke an atmosphere of inexplicable and unpleasant forces. For many readers the vital positive images of the last verse paragraph do not counteract the forbidding negativism of the beginning, although the point of the last paragraph is to make apparent the duality of God as Creator and Destroyer.

The second verse paragraph describes the limbo of possibilities awaiting actualisation. Here there is no necessity, no prime mover, no first efficient cause. Possibilities must be part of the past, and so they are poised for actuality, stretched on the rack between nonentity, 'the deeper nought' of non-being, and the point of becoming. Again there is an image of tension in the rack, but it is tension which will not be released; there is no laugh, no twang in the static original unity of the Ultimate. As if mirroring the unity in diversity of the Ultimate, the nervous alternation of short and long lines, of clear images with dark abstractions are contained in a slack, but nevertheless evident, net of distantly echoed rhyme. (p. 74)

There are limits to our prehension of the pre-actualised state, the bottomless depths of the pool of all possibilities. In verse paragraph three FitzGerald uses the metaphor of the diver reaching his physical limits to convey the distress of introspective contemplation of the mind's infinitely regressive model of the Ultimate. FitzGerald uses a neat piece of structural verisimilitude by introducing rhyming pairs of lines in contrast to the rest of the poem to underline the suffocation and constriction felt by man when he tries to fathom the Ultimate.

Against the cold retreating tunnel of the mind, verse paragraph four sets the warmth and brilliance of the world of actualities which create the senses and the life of immediate experience. Unlike the mind in paragraph three, the physical senses enable us to be receptors, not projectors of an immanent pattern. In a recapitulation of the imagery of paragraph one FitzGerald relates human sensation and feeling to the metaphysical system so far described. Change and its products, colour, light, life form human consciousness, and it is through feeling rather than mentation that understanding of time and change will come.

Paragraph five is the climax of the poem. Up to this point we have been shown the process of actualisation of the instant, the difficulty of prehending the possibilities present in the pre-actualised state, the immediacy and vitality of the physical actuality, then in paragraph five we are given a definition of eternity:

  For eternity is not space reaching
  on without end to it….
 
  It is your hand stretched out to touch your neighbour's,
  and feet running through the dark, directionless like darkness….

The last two lines sum up the duality of the system of process which FitzGerald describes in this poem. The eternal instant is both actuality and potential. Actuality is the reality of our hand about to touch another, the reality of feelings; potentiality the horde of possibilities returning to the pool of pre-creation after the actualisation of that possibility of stretching out to touch our neighbour.

What is contained in these two lines is developed in the last verse paragraph, but in between there is a variation and development of paragraph three. As all occasions come from the possibilities contained in the point of beginning, 'that intolerable centre', it is all that exists. Our minds may question that simple unity and construct in its place forces and laws to explain process and actuality, but they remain ideas which are not real entities. Real entities alone come from the primordial, pre-creation state of nothing, the darkness under the pylons. That darkness is life, not the immanent pattern which minds project onto fluent reality and call life. Life is not a flux but the eternal instant when possibilities are realised, when the many become one, and are increased by one, the new entity which has been created. The last point is vividly amplified in the image of the eggshell at the moment of hatching in the last paragraph. (p. 75)

The duality mentioned earlier is plainly seen in paragraph seven. The cosmic egg (the placeless timeless point) is under two pressures: the force from within of emergent possibilities; the pressure from without of physical actuality. In the eternal instant the egg-shell collapses and all possibilities return to the realm of non-being; yet the eternal instant is also the moment when some possibilities are released into actuality, are hatched and born. At this perilous edge of shell, where inward pressure matches outward pressure, when destruction and creation balance each other, life occurs, in the realisation of the many from primordial unity, and their return to it as further possibilities for the future. But with each collapse and with each bursting out a new entity is formed which will contribute to the shadows of merged possibilities held waiting on the rack in original darkness.

Though the ideas circle and change, slide away from a sure grasp, the power of the images of 'The Face of the Waters' does not vary. In the last paragraph particularly, the sudden movement of the verse, the concretely realised image of the fragility of life perilously balanced between creation and destruction, and the triumphant cry of optimism at the end satisfy the reader, even if he feels numbed by the abstractions which have gone before. What is most obvious from the poem is the movement away from the deity who provides the necessity for motion, to one who encompasses both opposing forces at work on the egg-shell in the final paragraph….

'The Face of the Waters' is about creation at macrocosmic and microcosmic levels. It is in turn pessimistic and optimistic in its view of God and the process of which He is part, and consequently it is both frightening and reassuring. It is a fine example of FitzGerald's metaphysical style put to work on an ambitious vision of what constitutes pur-pose, reality, and human comprehension. It is a worthy twentieth-century commentary on, and development of, the second verse of The Book of Genesis. (p. 76)