"Bleat!" is a strange way to begin a poem about the goddess of love. The word belongs to sheep and goats, not the sea, and it lands like a slap, one syllable and one exclamation mark, before we know where we are. What follows is not even a full sentence, just "the dank white 'plash of the gull," a phrase made of sound and weather. The quotation mark opened before "plash" is never closed, so the noise seems to hang in the air unfinished. Whether that is deliberate or a slip, it suits a poem about something that keeps escaping its frame.
The next lines quietly transform the bird. The gull is described in the vocabulary of a plant: a "sleek stem," "petals of iodine," a "bloom out-swelling the green wash of the sea." Iodine is a sharp choice, since it suggests the tang of salt air and seaweed, so the petals are smelled as much as seen. The repeated s-sounds in "sleek stem stripped sleeker still" make the line itself feel polished, and the comparative "sleeker" shows the language straining past ordinary sleekness. Even "the long scan of the waves" may carry a double meaning. To scan is to survey a horizon, but it is also what readers do to a line of verse. The sea, it seems, is both landscape and metre.
Only in the second stanza does a figure arrive: "I have seen her ride shelled in pearly rim." The poem never names her in its body, so the title does that work, and the shell and spray recall the old story of Venus rising from the sea foam. But she is no serene postcard goddess. She rides "sleepless doldrums," a phrase that joins the windless belt where sailing ships stall with the everyday meaning of low spirits. She is "Blushing with deceit and eloquence." A blush normally signals shame or innocence, yet here it colours a liar and a persuader at once. Love, the poem suggests, is beautiful and a little untrustworthy, most convincing exactly when she is least honest.
Then the poem swerves down to earth. "I have seen her in schools and in the stores." "Schools" slides between schools of fish, which keeps the sea in view, and the places where children are taught, while "stores" could be shops or supplies laid by. The sacred and the ordinary share one breath, joined by a slash instead of a dramatic pause. The speaker stretches the sightings across "my youth and old age" and places her "upon the labyrinth of currents," where currents might be of water, wind, or simply the drift of days. Her "hair and features of wind and sun" give her no fixed face. She is made of weather, so she can turn up anywhere.
The ending closes the circle. "Clothed this day in gulls wings" returns us to the opening bird, and the parenthesis "(white azaleas)" turns those wings into flowers, completing the gull-as-blossom image from the first stanza. The brackets read like a whispered aside, as if the speaker were admiring a last detail. The missing apostrophe in "gulls" adds to the sense, shared with the stray quotation mark, that the punctuation is loose and unfinished.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme. Slashes and dashes break the lines mid-flow, so the rhythm comes from interruption, with short stabs like "Bleat!" set against long, rolling lines that imitate swells. Sound does the binding work that rhyme usually does. The b of "Bleat," "bloom," "bow" and "Blushing" threads through the poem, while the soft s and sh of "shelled," "sleepless," "sea" and "spray" keep the sea audible.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to treat Venus as a statue from a myth book. She is something perceived, put together from a bird's wing, a whiff of iodine and a blush. A gull becomes a flower, the flower becomes a goddess, and the goddess becomes part of an ordinary day. Beauty and love are never found in one place. They are recognised again and again, in the sea and in the shop, by someone who has spent a lifetime learning what to look for.