Some poets use tides as an image for that which is irresistible.
Alfred Lord Tennyson used the tides as an image for the irresistibility of death in Crossing the Bar (1889). He hoped for calmness in his last moments: “such a tide as moving seems asleep, too full for sound and foam”.
The sea can be a metaphor for excitement, as well as calmness. In Meeting at Night (1845), Robert Browning described, with passion and urgency, a journey to meet a lover over “startled little waves that leap in fiery ringlets from their sleep”. The poet Elizabeth Barrett resisted her father’s wishes by marrying Browning and eloping with him to Italy. In A Sea-side Walk (1836), she wrote that the sea’s “vibration fast and strong” had a hold over how she thought and felt. John Masefield felt the same hold, imagining the sea as a place of resistance to dull domesticity: “I must go down to the sea again, to the vagrant gypsy life, to the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife.” (Sea Fever, 1902).
In Dover Beach (1867), Matthew Arnold described “the grating roar” of waves that sung an “eternal note of sadness”. In the television series The Sea of Faith, Don Cupitt said that Arnold “took the retreat of the tide as his metaphor for the decline of religion in Victorian Britain”. To me the poem seems to be a cry for resistance against the forces that bring war, ignorance and misery. Those forces may seem as irresistible to us now as they did to Arnold in the nineteenth century.
Emily Dickinson knew that the irresistibility of tides is an illusion. In The Moon is distant from the Sea, written between 1858 and 1864, the waves are “Obedient to the least command” of the moon. On her Sea-side Walk, Elizabeth Barrett-Browing, knew that the sea, “Swang in its moontaught way”.
In Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886), Tennyson hoped that “Chains of the sea shall be broken, and the thoughts of men be free”; and Bob Dylan echoed this is in his protest song, When the Ship Comes In:
And the words that are used
For to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they’re spoken
For the chains of the sea
Will have busted in the night
And will be buried at the bottom of the ocean.
Thinking about tides reminds me that however powerful and irresistible a force may seem, there is always a cause of that force and so there is always a way of exerting some control and affecting change. Our capacity may be limited, but we retain the potential to bring some hope to our world; our world that is, as Arnold writes in Dover Beach, “So various, so beautiful, so new”.
Of all the poems mentioned in this short piece, I have chosen to publish the Elizabeth Barrett-Browning poem in full, because the last verse may sum up how some are feeling about the passing of a friend.
The poems mentioned in this article are available at https://allpoetry.com
except When the ship comes in, which is at https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/when-ship-comes/ and Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, which is at https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/locksley-hall-sixty-years-after
Remember: send your poems and ideas to poetry@sofn.uk