Robert Creeley "Water Music" Essay

Robert Creeley on "Water Music"

Water Music

The words are a beautiful music.

The words bounce like in water.

Water Music,

loud in the clearing

off the boats,

birds, leaves.

They look for a place

to sit and eat--

no meaning,

no point.

Robert Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts; on May 21, 1926 He attended Harvard University from 1943 to 1946, taking time out from 1944 to 1945 to work for the American Field Service in Burma and India. In 1946 he published his first poem in the Harvard Magazine Wake.

After looking over many of his poems I feel what he writes. His poems are direct representations of actual feelings and emotions. His early poems were quite short and not direct. Vague references to his emotions were common. As he matured in his writings his poems gradually grew in length. This poem was written in 1967, well into his published writing career, which began in 1946.

When I first read this poem it reminded me of my own writings, very vague and obscure, almost as if the writer was not entirely trusting of the secrecy of the paper. His poems truly place emotion first. When I read Creeley's poems they paint a picture in my mind about what emotion he is pleading to express.

Water Music is an out of place poem, much shorter than most of the poems of that particular era of his writing. It seems to start with a beautiful picture of nature and peaceful existence. The water and birds and leaves aren't existing,