Strange Waters is a narrative poem by George Sterling released in a small chapbook edition in 1926, the same year Sterling died by suicide. As his last published poem, the language is more economical than the “things of tinsel and fustian, the frippery of a by-gone fashion” that drew criticism earlier in his career when his “brilliant but too facile craftsmanship was tempted by the worst excesses of the Tennysonian tradition,” according to Harriet Monroe of Poetry Magazine.
Sterling’s lyrical intemperance had, however, attracted praise from Ambrose Bierce, who for nearly a decade mentored him and enthusiastically publicized his poems, most notably in an effusive afterword for “A Wine of Wizardry,” a decadent and hallucinatory horror-fantasy poem published in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1907. Controversy over Bierce’s claims of greatness for Sterling went viral across US print media, and arguments over Sterling’s talent—or lack of it—made him famous. Clark Ashton Smith credited “A Wine of Wizardry” with inspiring him to write poetry at age fifteen and soon became Sterling’s protégé and a lifelong correspondent.
Aside from connections with weird fiction, Sterling—as a Bohemian figure, perhaps more than as a writer—influenced many contemporaries whose work has fared better than his. He shared an intense friendship with Jack London, critiquing and polishing London’s novels The Call of The Wild and The Sea-Wolf. He was a founding member of the West Coast artist’s colony Carmel-by-the-Sea, an early twentieth-century self-styled pagan commune of sorts populated by writers, artists, musicians, theater people, and other nonconformists.
Biographical information matters to me when reading Strange Waters, because the poem’s glaringly offensive flaw—the twist ending that I’ll spoil for you momentarily—is the sort of thing too easily dismissed as lazy writing, or a product of olden times, as if everyone in the vaguely defined past suffered from debilitating sexual repression and unexamined prejudices.
This simply isn’t true.
Nor is the potential accusation of lazy writing. Every choice in the poem, including what is not said, feels precise and deliberate. The plot twist could easily play as slapstick. But rather than presenting this potentially titillating “tale of forbidden love” in a saucy manner, our narrator opens with brooding insomniac musings, a compulsion born of gulls crying out and storm gales brewing over the nighttime sea. Mournful framing sets the stage for a tragedy rather than a farce.
Our narrator introduces Ralph and Mary, a fairly average and averagely happy heterosexual couple living on the California coast. Their equanimity is interrupted by a letter from Mary’s estranged brother in Ireland. Physically reacting to the letter “as tho it were a snake,” Mary throws it on the floor. Of her brother, Mary will only say he is a “monster.”
From his deathbed, the brother has sent his eighteen-year-old twin daughters to live with Mary. They’ll be arriving soon to “avenge me for a distant hour, your nails along my cheek, your virtuous words.” Mary suggests the girls might be better off sent “to some good school,” but Ralph shuts down the conversation, insensitive to the implications of assault in the letter, and Mary’s obvious misgivings.
The girls arrive. Intrusively, our narrator describes them, and continues re-describing them—one might even say fetishizing them—as the poem goes on. We hear they’re beautiful and tall, like “twin eaglets, fierce of eye and orange-crowned.” Of the two, Deidre is “more girlish” while Callirhoe is “an inch taller, and shouldered like a boy.” Deidre isn’t mentioned again until the end of the story, whereas Callirhoe is granted an assertive personality. She winces gruffly when Mary kisses her in greeting, trounces Ralph’s philosophical arguments in conversation, and makes a habit of staring him down. With wounded pride, Ralph’s anger and suspicion fester.
You see where this is leading, don’t you?
The transmisogynist tropes are all there, except for a prominent Adam’s apple and five o’clock shadow.
Callirhoe is going to die, though not directly by Ralph’s hand. His spying, harassment, and threats drive the girls to flee, resulting in Callirhoe’s fall from a sea cliff “clad scantily in her scarlet bathing suit.” Found thus bared, she’s subjected to an unfortunate and cheap twist ending I’m all too familiar with. I call it “Dead Gender Reveal Party.” While handling her corpse, Ralph exclaims, “Christ, Mary! Christ! Callirhoe’s a boy!”
Not only is Callirhoe portrayed as an absurd caricature of supposedly masculine traits, she’s murdered, manhandled, and misgendered for shock value. She’s literally referred to after death as “the other.” Before the big shock, though, there’s another shock; two, in fact. Ralph discovers, by snooping at their bedroom door, that the twins are incestuous lesbians.
The brother’s letter has suggested he passed down his incestuous leanings to his children, and Mary’s behavior confirms some family dysfunction, but the idea of homosexuality is what most outrages Ralph. The plot moves according to Ralph’s growing rage step by step toward greater perceived perversities, positioning transness as the greatest perversion of all.
While there’s no excuse to write a transgender character in such an objectifying and cartoonish way in 2026 (although contemporary authors I won’t name have proudly done so and somehow evaded censure), what about one-hundred years ago? Can we dismiss Strange Waters as an antiquated product of its time?
Even if the correct scholarly answer is yes, dismissal doesn’t satisfy me. Dismissal is too close to denial. The fascist claim that being transgender is a new fad unheard of in the past is a deliberate lie. Erasing records of our existence, destroying research on our medical care, and eradicating language that names our legacy help perpetuate that lie, tactics most famously practiced in Nazi Germany and widely used in the US today. Cutting out the parts of history you don’t like and repackaging the past for a new and newly ignorant generation has become streamlined by modern techno-fascists; through our personal devices, information is simultaneously ephemeral and ubiquitous, while our attention spans are weary, waning, and overtaxed.
Denial is a spell that’s easy to fall under. Denial is a tool of oppressors and abusers. Dismissing human hatred and misogyny as things of the past represents a form of cultural denial that allows that which is denied to flourish.
Hatred does the most harm in disguise. In the deepest waters, the parts of our being that have yet to be explored, the tendrils of hatred find fertile conditions for growth. We may wish to see ourselves as having overcome all prejudices and biases at some point in our personal or societal histories, but overcoming is cyclical, part of a meaningful life’s ongoing work. We enable hatred when we pretend it’s behind us.
We might say George Sterling mistreated and exploited Callirhoe as you’d expect for a man of his time, but since he lived, worked, and performed with nonconformists, was openly polyamorous, and was far too popular and active as a socialite in artsy circles not to know plenty of queers and a few transgender people, I wonder how much blame lies with the poem’s patriarch Ralph rather than the author. In trying to sort out prejudice from portrayal, I’m drawn into a darker, weirder story lurking beneath the surface of the story in Strange Waters.
Maybe this is my compulsive habit as a fiction writer, re-making art that’s failed me. Maybe I’m telling myself a different story because the plot of the poem is offensive. Or maybe I’m rebelling against writing nonfiction because it collapses possibilities into fact, and writing, to me, is about expanding—or exploding—the possible.
With two patriarchs in Strange Waters, Ralph in the present and Mary’s brother in the past, we open with an insomniac narrator musing about the stormy sea. Their mournful voice is soon subsumed by Ralph, whose hostile dialogue and action moves the plot forward. These dual voices remain somewhat in opposition throughout the poem, as do the double patriarchs, and other doublings and couplings that build both ambiguity and tension.
In Gothic fashion, the past violates the present, doubling time when first the letter and then the twins (themselves doubles) arrive from Ireland. Mary’s brother implies some horrific or cruel parallel when he writes of his daughters, “Ha! We are of the same blood, they and I! There’s more in that than you’ve a notion of.” Does this mean that they are, to use Mary’s word for her brother, monsters?
Resonances, ripples, waves; we might wonder how much Mary, who is utterly un-shocked by Callirhoe (both alive and dead), recognizes in the twins. Is her brother really her sister? The narrator never swerves from calling this a “tale of forbidden love” rather than a tale of perversion or abuse. And how exactly do monsters reproduce?
“Like sea-born things,” the girls go swimming three times a day, every day, eschewing the company of chaperones. They’re strong swimmers, described as feral or mythological creatures: “twin eaglets,” “stranded stars,” “wild things,” “gorgeous snakes about to strike,” and “amorous reptiles.” Song-like interludes in their voices punctuate the narrative, and it’s not clear if these are their thoughts, their actual words, or some psychic, siren-like intrusion. Perhaps these are the sad, desperate, and rebellious songs of a dying species; of mermaids.
Who hears these songs? Is it Mary, who has no children, despite a marriage with “love-hunger long to satisfy” in which she and Ralph “longed…often for dear children”? Mary’s silence is pivotal, holding certain mysteries below the surface of the plot. Instead of a drowning (an ending), things unknown perpetuate doubts that keep the plot alive after the story is over.
Likewise, instead of resolving reader uncertainty by showing the drowned maiden of Gothic tradition, Deidre swims away, neither definitively alive nor dead, but becoming (narratively) something Other. Just before they find Callirhoe’s body, a fisherman tells Ralph and Mary that he saw Deidre from a distance “take the surf at yonder beach, alone, and watched her head on every wave until she faded in the distance. Say—she’ll be in China in a week or two!”
Mary makes her single decisive statement to Ralph about Deidre’s missing body: “No—you’ll look in vain. She’s gone forever.” We don’t know how she feels or what motivates her; only that Mary forbids a search party.
The story I’m left with is fanciful. It’s about a family of cryptids separated by the flight of their matriarch, who has rejected her sea-born powers in favor of domestic normalcy. Drawing parallels between the strange waters of the subconscious mind and the actual sea, I’m reminded that what we know of marine biology includes more complex reproductive processes and gender flexibility than the mere idea of transgender mermaids, or of an estranged brother who somehow impregnates himself, or of a not-mother who protects a child’s gambit toward freedom that might mirror her own past. The deepest parts of the ocean remain subject only to scientific speculation, not exploration. Maybe they’re like the psychological depths of our being, the places where poetry originates.
I’m also left thinking about the poet composing the tale near the Pacific Ocean, perhaps gazing out into the darkness, disturbed by stirring waves and crying gulls on yet another sleepless, hungover night. He would have been about two years younger than me at the time. I wonder how often Sterling’s fingers strayed to the vial of cyanide labeled “Peace” that he was known to have kept with him for nearly the last twenty years of his life.
Is Sterling’s sympathy lacking, or did he intend to critique Ralph’s petty cruelty? Did he intend to show a system where women have no power and morals are upside-down? He might have treated the mermaids better in death and not made Callirhoe a punchline, but I realize there’s only so much empathy you can expect from certain men, especially those cheated by toxic fame and feeling past their prime. Sometimes, as he may or may not have meant to imply, the best option is to take to the surf and see where it leads you; to take flight, and become what you never imagined possible.
Strange Waters (1926) by George Sterling may be read for free at the Internet Archive.
Resources:
Harriet Monroe “Review: The Poetry of George Sterling” Poetry Vol. 7 No. 6 March, 1916
Harriet Monroe “Two Poets Say Farewell” Poetry Vol. 29 No. 4 January, 1927
Joy Lanzendorfer “Bohemian Tragedy: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of George Sterling’s California Arts Colony” Poetry Foundation, February 26, 2018
Gary Kamiya “S.F.’s Unofficial Poet Laureate Thrived In ‘Cool, Grey City of Love’ —For a Time” San Francisco Chronicle, October 15, 2020
Jim Fisher “George Sterling: Historical Essay” FoundSF.org (digital historical archive managed by Shaping San Francisco)
Peter Kratzke “The Man Who Would Have It All: George Sterling and The American Dream” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, 1900 to Present June, 2005
Joe Koch writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Their books include The Wingspan of Severed Hands, Invaginies, Convulsive, and The Couvade, which received a 2019 Shirley Jackson Award nomination. His short work appears in The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Southwest Review, Nightmare, Vastarien, and many others. Joe co-edited the art horror anthology Stories of the Eye and has collaborated with other authors and poets on several speculative writing projects. Find Joe (he/they) online at horrorsong.blog.
Copyright 2025 Joe Koch.
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