I rewatched The View From Halfway Down and the plotline with Secretriat and his poem made me think about something I read once, that all 29 people who survived a suicide attempt off the Golden Gate bridge regrertted it the moment they jumped, and how it was showed through the poem.
When they're having the Worst Thing/Best Thing game, Secretriat says the best thing he did was jump off that bridge because he got to make his own choice and go on his own terms. The poem is divided into three (uneven) parts:
The descriptions in the first three stanzas create a very pastoral, serene scenario. A summer sun, a regal river, soft breeze. It's written in third person, which create a certain distance. This is something that's happening to someone else, not you or me, this is a daydream, something one fantasies about, sees someone else do and want to try it for oneself.
The single stanza written in second person, things become more personal. This is what you wanted, isn't it? To fly. "You see things clear than from the ground" - I adore the multiple meanings here. You literally see things clearer now than when you were on the bridge, the view is closer. Once you land all the ground, you won't see anything angmore. You see now that you don't actually now, but it's too late because you're halfway down.
3. Hitting the ground / regret
Secretriat's panic and regret in first person in the last three stanzas. There is no longer distance, this isn't happening to someone else, this isn't a fantasy, it's real. He'd give everything for his feet to be back on the road above. The howling of the wind abruptly halts when he hits the ground, he wished he could've known that he'd regret his decision halfway through.
This is such a great poem and I think it's interesting how at the beginning of the episode Bojack tells Herb about this reoccurring dream where he was having dinner with all the people who were gone and thought "hey, I should do that!" basically confessing that he kept thinking about the people he lost and contemplated suicide, how Diane recalls the voice message he left her where he said "I'm gonna go back swimming, because no one cares about me anyway" and how during the dream, when he realized he was dying, he immediately regretted it and tried to run away from the door until he called "Diane" and accepted it was too late.
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