This Poem Accidentally Taught Me the Mystery of Love & Life
We are all part of one process — love through giving and remaking itself 🌊💞🏝
I had the chance to learn about this poem during Filipino literature class as one of our assigned readings.
The poem is entitled ‘Gabu’, written by Carlos A. Angeles who is known for his two poetry collections: ‘A Stun of Jewels’, a collection of 47 poems which was published to great acclaim in 1963. And ‘A Bruise of Ashes’ which was published by Ateneo University Press in 1993.
Angeles was a recipient of the prestigious Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature in the Poetry category in 1964 which was newly added to the list of categories.
His first collection of poems were dedicated to his wife Concepcion Reynoso.
Nature as the process of love — my first impressions
The poem ‘Gabu’ itself is pretty short. Only five stanzas, the last one being a a single line.
When I first read the poem, I tried to understand it without looking at past interpretations, so that I can read it without bias and come to my own conclusions.
The word ‘gabu’ refers to two things:
- It is a location, a barangay in Ilocos Norte, Philippines near a seaside beach.
- It is a Cebuano term which when translated to English means “pull out by the roots”.
The title of the poem in itself captures the mystery of duality. Referring to a specific location, while at the same time a word which means to be uprooted — to not belong and be removed from one’s context.
The poem’s first three lines create a contrast between land and sea:
“The battering restlessness of the sea
Insists a tidal fury upon the beach
At Gabu, and its pure consistencyHavocs the wasteland hard within its reach.”
This distinction will grow even murkier as the poem goes on. A bashing of “the heart”, an organic part of what is flesh. The sea is “restless” and it “insists”. Nature has a drive — a Desire. Something bigger, expansive and almost ineffable is further being alluded to in the lines:
“[…] Farther than sight itself, the rock-stones part
And drop into the elemental wound.”
A “wound” another allusion to organic flesh, imagery that emerges as muddied dichotomies of the flesh, the sea, and rock formations permeating and intersecting one another. All seemingly part of one organism, one body, one process — all natural phenomenon in the same way that the cells and organs in our bodies interact, are wounded, and reconstituted.
There is a continual unfolding and breaking apart occurring in the poem. In cellular biology, we can see the breakdown of clear distinctions between life and death. Is an organic cell alive or dead? What counts as living or dead in Nature?
On a microscopic level these are just processes acting upon and collectively constituting higher-level processes in a continuous feedback loop. If all parts that composed our physical being as a process ceased, then a new process transforms those parts and are reconstituted in a different “process-being”.
“The waste of centuries is grey and dead
And neutral where the sea has beached its brine,
Where the split salt of its heart lies spread […]”
Ocean “brine” is formed deep beneath the underground ocean due to environmental interaction of ancient salt deposits. Often creating dense formations of salinity near the seafloor called ‘brine pools’ or ‘brine lakes’.
Paradoxically, brine pools become a site of death because the chemical mixture of the brines is toxic to ocean life. As well as showing how life can adapt and thrive in such environments, outside the edges of the brine pool (shown in this video):
The last line in the third stanza of the poem:
“[…] Among the dark habiliments of Time.”
Habiliments refer to clothes or appropriate dress for occupation or occasion. Clothes are used to regulate our temperature and help us blend into the context of specific environments. Clothes are often thought of as an expression of inner character.
Time cannot be reversed, it only marches forward. Organisms are forced to adapt in order to survive. Nature is a process of self- regulation and homeostasis to blend and adapt to the external environment over time.
“The vital splendor misses. For here
At Gabu where the ageless tide recurs […]”
The essential beauty of life fated by process, “misses” — a failure to come into contact with or a desire for (interaction & connection) caused by the absence of the object-of-desire.
The word “Gabu” is repeated — to be here in-present and to remove oneself from the present. A process not mired by Time in recursion.
The last line of the fourth stanza:
“All things forfeited are most loved and dear.”
That which we lost, we desire, it will come back to us again in another form since “the ageless tide recurs”. Nature is made up of give-and-take relationships. Love here becomes something reciprocal and is of a deep distant longing.
“It is the sea pursues a habit of shores.”
Not using words like “that” or “which” shows there is no compartmentalization or distinguishing itself as some separate entity.
The sea is a boundlessly bounded many which seamlessly transitions as one line, one process — “a habit of shores” or a continual interaction process of contact driven by Desire.
The poem shows us that Nature itself is fraught with Desire, pursuing connection and interaction in its exchanges. Making the parts into one consistent total reality. It is the reciprocal process of love.
A process of tending towards one another and breaking down upon contact with another becoming something new altogether.
Looking back on it now… — past interpretations
The usual interpretations of the poem focuses on its melancholy — the impermanence of life, our desire for something stable and eternal but never quite reaching it.
The poem reminds us that our lives are fleeting and that the only constant thing in life is change.
Life can be rough, like the sea. But we can believe that if the sea can find stability once it meets the shore, we can find it too.
Looking back, I think I may have read too much into the poem that might not have been part of the original author’s intention.
I wasn’t able to see the somber moods that the poem was alluding to on my first reading.
Giving & letting it go together
Even if it may not have been intentional, what I learned from the poem is:
- Everything in life is a process of interactive change. We ourselves are made up of processes underlying other processes. We should learn to trust the process and embrace change and grow through them. Small consistent actions/habits is how people and environments evolved. Every end of a life process is the start of another.
- Love is about learning to hold on and let go at the proper time. We all seek to be in contact with something or someone more than ourselves. “No person is an island.” Loving means giving our best in the moment. It means we should cherish the moments and people in our life as they come, but learn to let go just like the movement of the sea. Letting go doesn’t mean you stopped loving someone, it means you’ve honored that love for what it is in the time you had it.
The imagery in the poem reminds me of that scene in the show WandaVision wherein both have an intimate conversation regarding Wanda’s feelings of loss. She describes it as a “wave washing over” her, that it just keep coming back to “drown” her.
“But it can’t all be sorrow — can it?” Vision responds. And in the end he says that now iconic line: “But what is grief, if not love persevering?”
