Eleanor Wilner: “Like as the waves…”: Vibrant Disturbance as Form and Message in Poetry and Nature (January 2002)

Why can we stare for hours at waves or fire? What makes those waves so compelling, and what can wave motion, as described by physics, tell us about how meaning is carried through the medium of poetic language? Looking at poems by Shakespeare, Whitman and Roethke that draw both subject and motion from waves, Eleanor Wilner explores how pattern and random variation of waves speak to what is oldest and deepest in us—the receptors of our brains, our oceanic origins, the systole and diastole of the heart.