Everyone in "Marinorama" is looking at someone else and wishing to be them. The poem sets two groups on either side of a stretch of water, the spectators on the cliffs and the men in the small boats, and lets us watch each envy the other. By the final line the symmetry is exact, and the poem's whole argument is folded into it: the grass is greener, or the sea bluer, wherever you are not standing.
The title is a coinage that rewards a second look. It sounds like "panorama" or "diorama" with the sea swapped in, and that is the first hint of the poem's method. A panorama is a view, something seen from a distance and framed for pleasure. The first stanza gives us precisely that: a scenic sweep from Sunset Cliffs to the reefs beyond La Jolla Bay, delivered as a tourist might receive it. The word promises a picture, and the poem then shows what the picture leaves out.
The first stanza is built from motion. The boats "troll," "lean," "lurch," "slew," and the verbs arrive in a rolling series that imitates the swell itself. The lines are long and uneven, with no rhyme and no fixed meter, so the rhythm behaves like water: it surges, drops into a short line like "lurching in the shallow troughs," then stretches out again over the "heavy seas abeam." The sound work is lovely without being showy. "Slewing on the southward run" hisses and slides, and "humping backs of the waves" turns the ocean into a herd of heavy animals. Even the people on shore are caught up in the motion, "waving their heads in time with brown stick masts waving back and forth." The watchers sway like the boats, mimicking what they see. Their longing is physical, a lean of the body. They "lean forward in the wind of their own hillsides," a phrase that quietly gives the land its own weather, as if even the cliff-dwellers want to be at sea.
What they see is "the clean white bow-stroke," and the adjective is the trap. From above, the work looks clean. Distance purifies it into line and color: white wake, brown masts, green swells. The stanza ends on a soft wish, "the touch of sea," which sounds almost tender, a caress rather than a labor.
The second stanza answers that tenderness with a torrent. Where the first sentence-chain was driven by graceful verbs, this one is driven by a catalog of complaints, and it is deliberately overstuffed: "wind and tangled lines, plunging hull, crosswise waves, broken hooks, diesel smell, the everlasting stink of fish, the bloody deck, the slipping boots and slimy handholds." The line runs on well past comfortable breathing, and that is the point. The fishermen's experience cannot be taken in at a glance; it has to be endured item by item. Notice too how the senses change. The cliff-watchers deal almost entirely in sight, with all that squinting and staring, while the fishermen live in smell, touch and taste, in stink, slime and salt. The poem quietly argues that seeing a life and living it are different kinds of knowledge.
The ending is the cleverest move. The fishermen "scream profanely to the wind," and what they wish is "to God they were ashore, / standing with the landsmen on the cliff, / wishing they were fishermen." The last phrase loops the poem back to the line that closed the first stanza. The fishermen wish to stand among people who wish to be fishermen, which means they are really wishing for the wish itself, the pleasant ache of wanting something safely out of reach. Nobody in the poem is allowed to be content, and nobody is shown to be wrong, since each side's longing is perfectly sincere.
What makes "Marinorama" worth reading is how lightly it carries this idea. There is no narrator scolding anyone for their blindness. The poem simply puts two perspectives next to each other and lets the echo do the moralizing. It is also quietly funny, with its swearing sailors and swaying spectators, and that humor keeps a familiar truth about envy from turning into a lecture.