The Tides
I saw the long line of the vacant shore,
The sea-weed and the shells upon the sand,
And the brown rocks left bare on every hand,
As if the ebbing tide would flow no more.
Then heard I, more distinctly than before,
The ocean breathe and its great breast expand,
And hurrying came on the defenceless land
The insurgent waters with tumultuous roar.
All thought and feeling and desire, I said,
Love, laughter, and the exultant joy of song
Have ebbed from me forever! Suddenly o’er me
They swept again from their deep ocean bed,
And in a tumult of delight, and strong
As youth, and beautiful as youth, upbore me.
Sometimes, a formal poem can be more effective than free verse in embodying process and movement. This may have been truer in the days when poetic convention allowed for varieties of inversion. Inversion seems partly to account for the growing vigour of rhythm in The Tides, a Petrarchan sonnet full of syntactical and structural turnings that help to realise the principal metaphor.
It was collected in A Book of Sonnets (Masque of Pandora and Other Poems, 1875) and we can fairly assume that Longfellow was writing, still, from the long shoreline of mourning for his second wife. She was burnt to death, and it may not be insignificant that this sonnet concerns fire’s antithesis, water.
Narrative phases work both with and against the sonnet’s structure. Two such phases, given a sentence each, occupy the octet and work within its two quatrains. First, barren and exposed, the stretch of the shore and its various details are placed. Nothing exceptional occurs in the diction or rhythm. The first line is arrestingly low-key, and the opening quatrain has a slightly repetitive and plodding rhythm, with parison (“upon the sand” / “on every hand”) that might be criticised as dull. In its favour, it helps project a mood. Shells are allowed no sparkle, seaweed, no colour: the rocks are uniformly brown. This may be credible description, but it is selective enough to convey desiccation and depression. Longfellow establishes the sea-deserted view as both an external and an internal one.
In the next narrative phase, the aural replaces the visual. The sounds indicate a region beyond the glum, enclosed circle of the self. With the tide’s turning, syntactical inversion makes itself felt: “And hurrying came on the defenceless land / The insurgent waters with tumultuous roar”. That’s the big one, but the little inversion, the verb-pronoun twist of “Then heard I”, is also important, emphasising auditory process over auditor.
The tide’s “volta” isn’t conventionally placed in the sonnet; although it marks a new kind of attention in the speaker, it introduces a certain ominousness via the war vocabulary of “insurgent” and “defenceless”. The phrase “tumultuous roar” is admittedly not original: Phillis Wheatley, for instance, described a storm at sea in similar terms. But the soundscape is effective, continuing the mimetic cramming-in of syllables, which began with “hurrying” in the preceding line, and furthering the change of pace, the jolt out of the pedestrian, that prepares our speaker to be “surprised by joy”.
He’s still unable to relinquish despair. “I said” introduces and spells out the loss directly. The simple past tense suggests this saying to be a habit, incessant in the dialogue with himself. The list is exorbitant: “All thought and feeling and desire … / Love, laughter, and the exultant joy of song”. This seems to go beyond mourning, and to imply the losses of old age and faltering inspiration. But already the psychological tide has turned, and there is verbal energy even in this gathering of losses. The poet naturally helps the tidal metaphor along with the verb “ebbed”.
Restoration comes in a surge after the caesura in line 11: “Suddenly o’er me”. This second turn marks the transformation of the despair instigated by the first (between lines eight and nine), registering it physically as well as mentally. The bold feminine rhyme (“o’er me/ upbore me”) adds to the sense of a body literally engulfed, and spirits buoyed by the effortless force of the incoming waves.
“Tumult” is now associated with “delight” and the tide embodies the strength and beauty of youth. These lovely last lines summon Longfellow’s boyhood in Portland, Maine, and what Eric S Robertson, an early biographer, called “the Forest City … with its great gulf of rolling blue”. When the speaker refers to the “deep ocean bed” as the source of these feelings, it seems an intuitive reference to the originary subconscious mind of childhood.
The movement of The Tides suggests a human pulse. Perhaps we can take the measure of its seriousness from another, earlier poem, collected in 1858, My Lost Youth, where “the sea-tides tossing free” are central to the cornucopia of maritime memories. In The Tides some of that restless energy of sea, wind and “a boy’s will” returns. It enters the predetermined and more abstract form of the sonnet in the guise of complex sentence-shapes and sound-patterns, and rhetorical devices that may display mature technical virtuosity, but are not merely that.