Simpson’s “Marine — after Rimbaud” reads like a bright, half-dreamed seascape. It opens with ship prows, described as silver and copper chariots, driving through foam and tearing at shoreline brambles. The boundary between water and land already feels violent and strange. That image feels both mechanical and mythic, as though the vessels are war-chariots riding the water. Then the eye moves outward and eastward with the offshore currents and the ebbing tide, toward forest columns and the wooden pier. The closing lines focus on the pier, which seems “bending wounded with whirlpools of light.” The mood is not calm but charged and glittering: hard metal, moving water, and vegetation keep colliding, and the light itself feels almost violent. There is no clear human figure or story; what remains is the speaker’s attention, caught inside a fleeting, luminous vision of the sea.
Marine — after Rimbaud — Summary
The chariots of silver and copper — The prows of steel and silver — Beat the foam — Tear at the roots of brambles.
The offshore currents, And the huge paths of the ebbing tide, Circle toward the east, Toward the pillars of the forest —
Toward the timbers of the pier Where it is bending wounded with whirlpools of light.