A Seal
By Christopher Villiers
A slick bobbing blackness above the sea A seal's sleek smooth head proudly emerging, And its two black round eyes beholding me, Our two gazes into one converging. Ah strange creature, how could I understand, The world that is beating behind your eyes? How could I hold your wisdom in my hand? What wisdom have I that you ight feel wise? You go back diving into your retreat, Where my eyes cannot follow, I go by The empty shoreline with plodding feet, And there are no more seals for me to spy. But there still swims deep the shore's vision rare, In my mind's eye still hunts that seal's sharp stare.
I recently came across this poem while writing a review of Christopher Villiers new book Versing the Mystery. Villiers book is comprised of almost 200 poems with the vast majority being sonnets—an impressive feat in and of itself. This poem rose above the rest due to its ability to act as a culmination of Villiers work: a concerted effort to understand the complexity of God through His own divine language: formal poetry.
Poetry comes in all shapes and sizes; there are extremely well written sonnets, ghazals, narrative, and free verse poems. However, the poetry tradition is rooted in formal poetry. T.S. Eliot feared society had begun to take formal poetry for granted, and he moved away from that tradition with the intention of waking poets up to that reality. The origins of formal poetry begin from a belief that it was the closest thing humans had to the language of God. That’s why so many ancient texts are written in verse. Villiers understands this point.
“A Seal” takes us inside the poet’s point of view as he observes a seal wondering how, despite his intellectual superiority, he cannot fully understand the seal nor can he follow it when it dives down into the depths. As a sonnet, we find the climax in the couplet at the end: “But there still swims deep the seal’s vision rare, / In my mind’s eye still hunts the seal’s sharp stare.” The seal’s main action is to swim deep into the water—to places where the poet cannot physically go—is coupled with the mysterious “seal’s vision.” It is this vision that the poet seeks. Villiers also makes use of the mystery so often associated with the depths of the ocean.
However, it is a vision that Villiers provides us with; his aim is to “verse the mystery” and, implicit in that statement, is a belief that poetic verse provides one with a better way to understand God’s ways. The form, the sonnet, is the seal’s vision. It’s not so much that Villiers is giving us the answers to the questions as he’s setting up a worldview to search for them. The focal point of the seal is its eyes, and those eyes contain wisdom. Villiers accomplishes this not only through recognition of his need for this kind of vision, but through his craft and endeavors to articulate it to us in verse. In this way, he solves the problem and provides us with a complete poem, a complete sonnet.