THE TIDE RISES, THE TIDE FALLS
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The tide rises, the tide falls
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveller hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
For the third brief, I have chosen to work with a piece of poetry. The first thing I did with my poem was focus on personal thoughts and translation. Before starting the project, I didn’t know the poem, but it raised feelings and emotions the first time I read it. Some of them were probably the author’s intentions, but poetry always keeps space for a reader and their own opinions. I captured my own interpretation of the text.
The idea of my first experiment was to visualise the chosen piece of poetry using the letters and words of the poem, placing them into shapes to create a picture that translates the meaning of the poem, creating a piece of concrete poetry. First, I played around with simple shapes and then tried to create a whole complex picture that represents the meaning and my observations about the poem.
The second experiment was about visually translating the poem through a new language placed on the grid. This translation uses a new system of an alphabet, exchanging letters for positions on the grid supported by using dots, symbols, lines etc., creating diagrams/graphs like visualisations. I ended up with a visualised translation of the whole poem. However, after finishing this experiment, I knew that was not the right way to go, as it leaned away from the whole meaning of the poem.
In the third experiment, I focused on a moving image and a way to transfer my poem into an animation. The animated sketches in the video below are exploring the text being translated into a moving image. It is based on the narrative of the text, on the cycle of the tide, life and death, the darkness and light, but also my own understanding and feelings.
