Some poems tell us about a person by listing virtues. "Old Man Peterbaugh" does something cleverer: it shows a man at play in the water until, by the final line, he seems to belong to the water entirely. The subject is an elderly swimmer on the California coast, and the central idea is that joy, practiced daily and without self-consciousness, can make a person larger than his years, even a little mythic.
The opening sentence is a long, rolling claim. Emblen sets the scene with real place names, Bird Rock and the old Scripps pier, and a crowd of types: bathers, surf riders, divers for abalone. Then he measures them all against one man, who "laughs as much / or who greets the sea with half the joy" of Peterbaugh. The phrasing is a little backward, a negative comparison, but the effect is generous: the whole coastline is turned into a contest of enthusiasm, and an old man wins it without trying. The line break after "laughs as much" even leaves the laughter hanging in the air for a beat.
What follows is a catalogue of movements, and it is the poem's real pleasure. Peterbaugh teaches children to swim, "flailing long thin arms about like pelican wings." The simile is affectionate and slightly comic. He is not graceful in a polished way; he is gangly, bird-like, at home in a body that has stopped caring how it looks. Then come the verbs of rest and drift: he "floats spread-eagled," swims "between the waves," "doubles up to rest." The most memorable image is the spinning one, his bony hands paddling so that he turns "around and around, as on a spindle." A spindle is a tool for spinning thread, so the sea suddenly feels like a workshop, and the old man like a small, contented part of its machinery. His head and feet break the surface while the rest of him folds beneath, a pose that is both silly and peaceful.
The form supports this ease. The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme and no regular meter, and the lines vary in length, sometimes stretching out over a whole sequence of actions, sometimes shrinking to a short phrase like "who laughs as much." That unevenness mimics the sea itself, with its swells and lulls. The sentences are mostly built from simple, concrete verbs, and the semicolons in the middle section let each action sit beside the next like items on a shoreline, unhurried and unranked.
The ending changes the register. After all that bobbing and paddling, Peterbaugh "slowly swims ashore," and the language swells. He rises "from the clear green water of the cove," while "the sea running in torrents from his wrinkled hide" pours off him. The word "hide" is striking: it is the skin of an animal, not a person, and it quietly turns him into something like a seal or a sea creature. Around him, "wavelets foaming at his knees" and "seagulls crying from the rocks" supply a chorus, as if nature itself were announcing his arrival. The poem's last line makes the transformation explicit, comparing him to "an old man of the sea" who "might suddenly emerge." The phrase echoes the figure of the sea elder from old stories, a weathered being who belongs to the deep. Here, though, there is nothing frightening about him. He is simply what a lifetime of happiness in the water looks like from the shore.
That gentle shift from real to legendary is the poem's quiet achievement. Emblen never says that old age is beautiful or that we should keep our enthusiasms alive; he lets us watch a wrinkled, thin-armed man come out of the surf like a minor god, and the feeling arrives on its own. For a school reader, it is a useful example of how description can carry an idea. The poem is built almost entirely from things you could see, yet by the end those things have added up to a portrait of contentment so complete that the man and the ocean seem to share one body.