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A strong sense of building tension in this excerpt!
Epigraph
Initially I didn’t like the opening line, but then I found that I really enjoyed the play on “blew up.” He’s on a minesweeper, after all! And purple is, to me, a very original way to evoke the wind—nicely done! We have the phonetic repetition of “blew,” “blue,” and “blue” again, but I don’t think that it’s a problem here in the verse.
Stylistically the poem is emblematic of a young man very much a part of the western world; it’s more concrete and grounded than the other verses you’ve included elsewhere, and the evolving structure of these successive poetic interludes hints at the narrator’s evolving character as he’s exposed to elements of Asian culture previously unknown to him.
Paragraph One
This gives a strong sense of vulnerability and exposure, a sense of confronting things much larger than oneself and being helpless before them. “We are told” is a good choice of phrase, because it underscores the helplessness of the crew—they don’t see and can’t verify what happens, so they must take the word of whoever gives the report. On the sister ship—significantly and cleverly not named—a man is lost. The narrator and his crewmates can do nothing for him, as much because of the distance as because of the extremity of the weather.
I’d advise against the phrase “the night is black” because it’s something of a cliché. I would put the sentence beginning “The water is cold” before the one beginning “We are told.” That would pair the two sentences addressing the futility of a search/rescue.
I like that the sister ship is astern—that makes the narrator’s ship even less able to assist in any rescue attempt and underscores again the vulnerability. Heck, we don’t even know if a guy was really lost or not, but the report is enough to keep the narrator off the deck!
Paragraph Two
Nice shift in danger: previously the ship was vulnerable to nature; now it’s vulnerable to the weapons of man. It’s especially troubling that the minesweeper is imperiled by mines—as if the danger is inescapable even in a vessel designed specifically for dealing with the danger! This further highlights the narrator’s (and crew’s) helplessness. When were the other vessels sunk? It’s not central, but it might be good to know if they sank this morning or six months earlier to get a sense of time-proximity.
The narrator’s feeling of safety is effectively paradoxical—he’s approaching a heavily mined harbor, and a guy’s been swept overboard, but the narrator knows what he’s about to confront, and he knows that the danger is even greater ‘over there.’ His introspection about “seeing the land” is good; obviously he wouldn’t be able to see people dying, but he forces himself to think about them anyway. Or maybe he doesn’t force himself, and he just thinks about them because that’s how he is.
Watch the repetition of the word “mine,” which appears four times in this paragraph (if you include two uses of “minesweeper.”)
Paragraph Three
Hickey, even if based upon a real person, is a great caricature of the average unworldly American teenager. The narrator sees this, describing him as “from somewhere in America.” Even the name is a pun on “hick.” The thick glasses and cracked tooth make him clumsy and somehow innocent, further highlighting the general vulnerability here. The fact that he gets teary-eyed at what I’d think of as a pretty unemotional song tells me that he’s confronting something of his own. “Magnified sadness” is an excellent phrase describing both Hickey’s eyes through his glasses and his enhanced sorrow at being here or being away from his family or whatever—the source of his sadness doesn’t even matter, really, as much as the simple fact of it. I’d get rid of the closing sentence because it’s redundant and the paragraph is stronger without it.
Paragraph Four
The first sentence as written doesn’t quite make sense to me—I think that the phrase “we ride” is what does it. Can this be clarified? Also, the second sentence seems almost comical and out of place, because I don’t expect anyone on board to be very happy. Maybe a stronger, more evocative emotion than unhappiness?
The blue flame is a powerful, almost magical image, and it’s a good counterpoint to the surreal nature of war. The eruption of flame atop the mast in the relative stillness also parallels the uncertainty of danger which may likewise erupt out of nowhere. “Fascinated” might be redundant here, and the sentence reads just as well without it, though I’d suggest something stronger than “we look up,” which is a trifle bland in this context. I like that the Captain is called to the bridge to see it, and I like that he’s “The Old Man.” The fact that he is as transfixed as the crew gives him a sort of innocence that makes him seem as oddly out of his element as poor Hickey—very nice!
Again, watch the word-repetition: two “fire” and two “flame” in a very short span.
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When I first read it, this excerpt didn’t particularly thrill me because it seemed to lack the sensitivity of image that your other pieces have shown, but then as I re-read it I found that I really liked it. There’s a lot going on here behind the text, in much the same way that you can feel energy in air just before a big thunderstorm. As before, the narrator’s choice of observations is significant and effective. We don’t hear about the lousy food or the cold showers or the cramped quarters; we hear his impressions and his feelings addressing larger issues. He, too, seems out of his element, and he seems to be aware of it.
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