In the poems Peter Porter wrote between the late 1960s and the late 70s, the word ‘serious’ never appears except under strain and at slight angle from customary usage, and this is partly because of the pressure of its use by Alvarez and like critics. An example is to be found in ‘Seahorses’, from 1969's A Porter Folio, a poem in which Porter recalls finding seahorses upon the beach in the Australia of his childhood. Amidst descriptions of the child's heroic world to which the seahorses seemed to belong comes the thought of how sometimes they were ‘like a suicide wreathed in fine/ Sea ivy and bleached sea roses/ One stiff but apologetic in its trance.’ Later on, Porter reflects:

As Porter observes of ‘The Story of Jason’: ‘As with all good stories, one cannot tell/ If it is an allegory.’ Moreover, if this poem is an allegory, what it represents is not fixed. The ‘unbending/ Seriousness of small creatures’ is strange, and its strangeness may partly be explained by the fact that when Porter uses the word ‘creatures’, as in his poem ‘The Sadness of the Creatures’, the creatures he is thinking of are as likely to be human as animal. A small unbending armorial head perhaps recalls a coat of arms. But its seriousness is not simply a matter of heraldry, for the sight of this creature's seriousness comes with its death. Seahorses bend well enough alive beneath the sea; they are only unbending for us; for us they are wholly objectified. Furthermore, they seem loved creatures, small and odourless, their deaths distant, beautiful and romantic. This beauty is deliberately and jarringly deserted at the end of the poem, when the scale is enlarged and the stench of death brought in.