The Sea Was Never Blue

the sea was never blue to the ancient Greeks,
they gazed out to the sea
and saw movement and shimmer,
not a glimmer of reflective blue
but iron stamped into the eye
of sky and distant shore;
starry bronze
dark merging into black
or the gleaming grey iris
of a goddess --
colours experienced
in degrees of lightness and darkness
rather than in terms of hue;
how then did this affect
the poet who looked out to sea
and ignored the blue and saw only
the light darkening: even
where Aristotle differed from Plato,
he still shared Plato's Greek eye
for the brilliant and shining:
mathematical optics ignored
for their own theories
determining what the eye chose to see

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