The word "surfing" never appears in this untitled poem, yet the clues pile up quickly. "Adam's ale" is an old slang phrase for water, fingertips "feel the swell," someone will "travel kilometres for the right spot," and the last line has a figure riding a "glass sculpture." The subject is a surfer, and the central idea is that surfing strips a person down until little remains but nature itself. The poem treats the sport less as a hobby than as a state of being.
The most striking choice is the pronoun. The surfer is never "he," "she" or "I," only "it." That fits the claim that this figure is "Dehumanised because it has lost notion of language." The paradox "It is and is not" sits in the middle of the poem like a small hinge. The surfer is both human and no longer human, and "lives as a savage" is meant as freedom from words and social polish rather than cruelty. There is an irony here, because the poem uses language to describe someone who has left language behind.
The form is looser than it first looks. There are fifteen lines, which read as three four-line stanzas and a closing three-line stretch. The first stanza rhymes cleanly, with "breaking" and "aching" and then "swell" and "dwell." The second is slacker. "Language" and "savage" only half-rhyme, though "not" and "spot" click shut. The third pairs "break" with "stake" and "react" with "retract." In the final three lines, "gets," "nature" and "sculpture" barely hold together, with only "nature" and "sculpture" sharing a faint echo. Judging by the effect, the rhyme seems to dissolve as the surfer dissolves into the sea. The rhythm is just as uneven. A long, heavy line like "Relentless fluidity of movement, it has been aching" is followed by the clipped "It is and is not," so the lines swell and lull a little like water.
The key words repay attention. "Forever" appears four times, and it shifts meaning. At first it sounds like a sentence, since the surfer is "stuck" with the sound of breaking water. Later it sounds like devotion: "It forever knows and loves and will never retract." The word "break" also returns. First it describes the water, then the waves themselves: "They reach their apex, and they break." A wave's peak and collapse are the same moment, which may be what "what's at stake" means, since this beauty exists only briefly. The odd phrase "Adam's ale" also suggests something. Adam is the first human, so slipping his name into a poem about losing humanity may be deliberate, though that is an inference from the wording.
The most interesting reversal comes in the third stanza. The waves get human traits: "They have emotions, and they react." The rider, meanwhile, has lost language and become an "it." The poem swaps their roles, with the sea gaining feeling and the person gaining only instinct. The flat, almost clinical phrasing of "they react" works against the romantic subject, so the waves seem alive without being sentimentalised.
The ending lands on the image of the "glass sculpture." A wave is transparent and shaped by forces larger than itself, and it is gone within seconds. It is a sculpture that no one could ever keep. The last two lines echo each other: "It understands it is nothing but nature / It does nothing but ride." The repeated "nothing but" first reduces the surfer to nature and then reduces its actions to a single verb. The poem suggests that this reduction is the achievement, not a loss. The surfer has given up everything extra, including speech, comfort and identity, and what is left is complete attention to one moving thing.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it describes devotion without naming its subject or explaining it. Some phrasing is blunt, and the unnamed "it" and "they" can blur together on a first read. Even so, the rough edges suit a poem about becoming raw. It asks readers to consider that being "dehumanised" might sometimes mean being released, and that doing "nothing but" one thing can be a way of belonging to the world.