Watching the Dolphins
Watching the dolphins, David Constantine
poet reads poem
Our Pontonniers' handout:
David Constantine b. 1944
This contemporary poet lives in Oxford, where he teaches at
Oxford University. He is married with two children and has six grandchildren.
"Watching for Dolphins" is a poem which appears in a book of poetry
of the same name, published in 1983. He has published several other books of
poetry as well as translations of European poetry, novels, short stories and non-fiction
books. He is the co-editor of a literary journal, Modern Poetry in Translation. He has received many prizes for his
literature and translations.
source : https:// "David J. Constantine" Ben Wilkinson, 2009, literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/david-j-constantine,
consulted 1 Nov. 2018
'Watching for Dolphins'
Dolphins have a unique symbolism in
literature, and we know them nowadays as very intelligent sea mammals that can
communicate with each other with language and that live in communities not
unlike humans. There are also many types of dolphins that are endangered
species nowadays, a species whose numbers
are so small, they are at risk of extinction (Check out https://uk.whales.org/whales-and-dolphins/endangered-species. )
In
ancient Greek mythology, they symbolized divine protection and guidance,
messengers from the gods that were holy in the worship of Apollo and Poseidon.
Apollo was a god of wisdom and Poseidon was a god of the sea. In folk tales,
dolphins were the friends of sailors: often sailors did not know how to swim
and dolphins saved human lives in shipwrecks. That was seen as something
miraculous, that an animal would save a human who could have drowned.
In 'Watching for Dolphins' we can
feel the nostalgia. Everyone on the
ship is hoping to see a dolphin. In our modern day, sophisticated times, we get
the feeling that dolphins are a kind of tourist attraction, something to see.
Everyone is hoping to see one, but in this poem, no one on the boat sees a
dolphin or a school or pod of dolphins. Whatever that means, we get a feeling
of disappointment.
Form and style
Each stanza is made of six lines, of more or less the same
length. The layout looks formal and ordered, as if the poet has made a planned,
organized effort to look for dolphins and explore the situation with
discipline, with respect for traditions in poetry. Rhymes appear regularly at
the end of each line, showing the effort of the poet to make a structured and traditional poem.
However, if
we look for a rhyme scheme, we find that each stanza is different: ABABBB
ABCADD ABACDD AABCBC ABCDDA ABBACC It's
a chaotic and irregular rhyme scheme, showing a kind of disorder in nature. You might say, "rose",
"purpose", "bows" and "lose" in stanza 1 are not
rhymes, but they are half rhymes, weak rhymes, not full rhymes. In each
of those words, the "o" sounds different, and the "s"
sounds like a "z" in "bows". It is actually quite a clever
poem, because the rhymes reflect the disappointment, the lack of dolphins, in a
rhyme scheme that never meets our expectations in a satisfying way.
In the same
way, stanzas 1-5 all end in an enjambment,
as the search for dolphins never ends until the full stop at the end of the
poem (stanza 6). We can feel the disappointment each time we reach the end of a
stanza and have to keep going to the next line. The layout creates a space
between each stanza that is empty, like a fruitless effort or frustration, a
place where there is nothing to see. The empty space is ironic, because the scene portrayed is busy and active, full of
people and activities, but no dolphins.
Crowds of People
The speaker creates a setting we can easily imagine, "In
the summer months on every crossing to Piraeus". Summer is vacation time
and it is the height of the tourist season in Greece, where people go to relax,
go to the beach, and also visit ancient archeological sites. Piraeus is a port
full of thousands of ships going to all
the destinations in Greece, or even other countries, by boat. It is also an
important commercial port in Greece, so you could imagine all the people there,
in the warm summertime weather. The poet creates an emphasis by saying "every crossing". This suggests
that the speaker made many trips, throughout the summer in this port.
Different characters
In the first
part of the poem, different characters are described with visual imagery : "passengers" "in the packed
saloon" passing through a "small door" into the bow of the ship
(the back of the ship) makes us think of gamblers or cowboys, a common image in
Westerns, when a cowboy usually gets into a fight in a crowded room in old
movies. Stanza 1 ends with "One saw them lose" as if the fight or the
poker game was lost every time by these adventurers.
Stanza two,
following the enjambment creates a surprise,
"One saw them lose / Every other wish." The passengers are
transformed into wishful, aspiring people, hoping for something, some sort of
ideal. "The lovers", "a fat man", "children" are
all described individually, looking "day after day" for dolphins. The
vocabulary of religion and spirituality
appears in stanza 2 and is increased in stanza 4: the fat man stared "like
a saint" (a simile). "Every face... wanted epiphany" (a
spiritual discovery or realization), "praying the sky would clang and the
abused Aegean reverberate with cymbal, gong and drum", an auditory image associated with ancient
percussion instruments of dancing, singing, worship and prayer that also appear
in the Bible. Although the poem started out as a casual, almost clinical search
for dolphins, people seem to regress into a kind of ancient belief in the magic
and importance of dolphins that is more similar to ancient Greek mythology. The
Aegean appears in many ancient Greek myths and here is described as
"abused", as if the sea were polluted or damaged by the violent
impact of humans on nature. This oblique
reference to pollution, the extinction of dolphins and the destruction of
marine life in the Mediterranean is a subtle euphemism or understatement.
A happy lament
In Stanza 5, the speaker
imagines dolphins, "smiling, snub-nosed, domed like satyrs". This
visual image compares dolphins in a simile to a mythical legendary creature,
the satyr, who is part human and part animal. Satyrs were supposed to drink and
dance in the worship of Dionysos, a god of wine and celebration. But we see
that dolphins in stanza 5 have become a fantasy, not a reality, and the speaker
expresses regret with some emotion, "oh/ We should have laughed... We
should have felt them go/ further and further into the deep parts."
"Should have" expresses what the speaker regrets, something that he
wished had happened but didn't. In stanza 6, he uses the past perfect : "We had
not seen the dolphins". This shows that the action is over and puts
the ending of the search in the past.
Back to reality
In stanza 6,
"the company", the group of people that has been united by their
journey on the boat "disperses" or breaks up. They "prepare to
land in the city". "We were
among great tankers, under their chains/ In black water." The tourist boat is surrounded by tankers
which are huge boats that carry merchandise on a trade route, and we understand
that commercial trade is seen as a kind of heavy obligation "under
chains" to prevent the merchandise from getting lost or stolen. It is a
world of capitalism where possessions are represented as a form of enslavement,
and the water is described as "black" or polluted, the tanker casting
a dark shadow over the smaller boats. This understatement
holds a kind of accusation that perhaps there would be more dolphins in the
water, if the human impact on the environment were not so heavy.
This idea is
reinforced by the subtle image of gulls
in stanza 3. He asks a rhetorical
question. "Were gulls a sign...?" Seagulls are beautiful birds,
associated with beaches and seascapes. In ancient Greece, birds were considered
as divine, a kind of sign for prophesies. But nowadays, gulls are often
denigrated as searching for food that is considered garbage by other animals. A
gull is also "a gullible person, a dupe" and to gull someone is to
deceive or trick them. Have dolphins become a legend, made by the tourist
industry to bring more people to the Aegean? That would be particularly
cynical.
Tone
At first,
the speaker uses the third person
singular, "one noticed", which is a formal style, showing objective distance. He avoids using the first
person singular to make a formal report of what he saw, like a researcher or
scientist writing a paper. In a pun
in stanza 1, he says "certain passengers" had "serious looks and
no acknowledgement of a common purpose". This shows the formal style of
the poem at the beginning, as the vocabulary is precise, like a legal text, but
it is joke that 'a common "porpoise"' could be a kind of dolphin they
are all secretly hoping to see.
Handout taken from http://sosinglese.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/watching-for-dolphins.pdf
Narrative poem; like a prose
Identify:
1. sections
2. words
3. mood
4. speaker
5. audience
6. context
7. summary (literal)
8. techniques
9. images and concepts 10. theme statement
Sections: 5 stanzas: dolphins; last stanza: disillusion but resignation; the dolphins however are still there
Mood: hope to see the dolphins and joy first 5 stanzas - even if some words already prepare the reader to disillusion (hopeless; if, undecided); disillusion the last one
Speaker: observer that gets involved (we)
Audience: readers
Context: a group of passengers passing by the bridge to reach Piraeus port and wishing to see the dolphins on their journey.
Epiphany: sudden revelation of a hidden thought
Techniques:
Enjambment: continuity to the story
Simile: Like a saint: because the moment is so mysterious and mystic / like satyrs: divinity (play, dance)
Alliterations: movements in the sea (s)
point of view: we : human beings; they: dolphins
Contrast : at the end: from poetic words to concrete rough ones ; return to reality accepted; resignation
Theme: several connections to human ambitions and hopes in real life; human attraction for nature (freedom)
Three quick reactions
1. On the first read, it may seem like a simple poem about a group of passengers passing by the bridge to reach Piraeus port and wishing to see the dolphins on their journey.
However, this poem has several connections to human ambitions and hopes in real life and may also have some spiritual connections.
2. This dark, philosophical intensity and often uncanny beauty continues to flourish in Watching for Dolphins(1983), perhaps Constantine’s most widely admired volume and winner of the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Award. The book’s title poem is a simply told yet remarkably subtle tale of passengers on a boat to Piraeus waiting to see dolphins, ‘all want[ing] epiphany / [...] implor[ing] the sea [...] // [for] smiling, snub-nosed, domed like satyrs’. But instead of the dolphins appearing, the passengers are left ‘among the great tankers, under their chains / In black water’, their ‘eyes cast down’ as if registering a certain numbness, returning to their ordinary lives. A contemporary master in conjuring these moments of subtle, collective emotion, this skill in fact
places Constantine’s work as close to his more obvious European influences as to the likes of Sean O’Brien and Peter Reading, despite their differing styles and approaches.
3.Watching For Dolphins is probably David Constantine's most celebrated poem. On the surface it seems to tell a simple, uneventful narrative about looking for dolphins while crossing by boat to Piraeus, the busy port which lies a short distance south of Athens, the Greek capital. (The harbour has a long history - stretching back into classical times.) But, as in most of Constantine's poems, this poem contains resonances, allusions and hidden depths - in this case, literal hidden depths.
All the desires, hopes and dreams of the disparate passengers are focused on one thing: to see the dolphins. Isolated as they are individually, there's a common feeling that, if the dolphins had appeared, they would have bonded together in the shared unity of their experience: ... and had they then / On the waves, on the climax of our longing come / ... We should have laughed and lifted the children up / Stranger to stranger ...
Gradually throughout the poem this personal yet common longing becomes spiritual, religious in its intensity. The fat man stares like a saint; the gulls could be a sign; everyone wants epiphany. It's interesting that Constantine says that children would see dolphins if anyone would, for children are often more naturally receptive to and accepting of the wondrous and the divine, the numinous and the miraculous, than adults.
In the end the epiphany doesn't happen, and the poem ends anti-climatically. The people disembark with eyes cast down. They wake, blinking, as if emerging from a dream, a thwarted vision, another world. Though disappointed, they hide their disappointment, and leave the shared boat as isolated individuals once again.
I know this poem reverberates on many levels, but ultimately I think it's about the difficulty of locating the spiritual and the numinous in today's world, the world of the abused Aegean, which was once a mythical place of purity, a Garden of Eden before the Fall. (Athens is well known for its smog and pollution.) Now both it and the world are corrupted by tourism, materialism, shallow 'surface' experience, polluted with the great tankers, under their chains / In black water ...
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