Everyone who reads a poem reads it in a different way and sees different things in it, which probably the poet was not even aware of! When I was teaching poetry there would sometimes be quite noisy arguments between the students about the meaning of a piece of verse – and usually their ideas were also very different from mine.
In one of my novels ‘night vision’, one of the characters who in every other way is bold and brave and totally fearless, is petrified of the dark, and by the end of the novel he has had to endure several for him terrifying experiences. The novel ends, but in my mind the characters lives continued and in this unwritten part of the story he is able to cope with his fear by projecting memories of his love ‘like a shadow on the sky’. This poem may have been inspired by the death of a comrade, possibly at Gallipoli, even though the first line mentions ‘her’… but the vivid imagery can be interpreted in as many ways as there are readers.
I saw her like a shadow on the sky
In the last light, a blur upon the sea,
Then the gale’s darkness put the shadow by,
But from one grave that island talked to me;
And, in the midnight, in the breaking storm,
I saw its blackness and a blinking light,
And thought, “So death obscures your gentle form,
So memory strives to make the darkness bright;
And, in that heap of rocks, your body lies,
Part of the island till the planet ends,
My gentle comrade, beautiful and wise,
Part of this crag this bitter surge offends,
While I, who pass, a little obscure thing,
War with this force, and breathe, and am its king.”
Lois Elsden 