The Sea Hold
The Sea Hold - meaning Summary
The Sea's Enduring Knowledge
The poem presents a speaker’s intimate, repetitive meditation on a coastal scene and the sea’s vast, inscrutable presence. Small human details—five houses, clam boats, a tar-paper shack and five men—anchor transient lives, while the sea endures and “keeps all.” The speaker admits obsessive fascination and forgetfulness about his own sea songs, concluding that the sea knows more than people do, acting as a repository of memory and mystery.
Read Complete AnalysesTHE SEA is large. The sea hold on a leg of land in the Chesapeake hugs an early sunset and a last morning star over the oyster beds and the late clam boats of lonely men. Five white houses on a half-mile strip of land … five white dice rolled from a tube. Not so long ago … the sea was large… And to-day the sea has lost nothing … it keeps all. I am a loon about the sea. I make so many sea songs, I cry so many sea cries, I forget so many sea songs and sea cries. I am a loon about the sea. So are five men I had a fish fry with once in a tar-paper shack trembling in a sand storm. The sea knows more about them than they know themselves. They know only how the sea hugs and will not let go. The sea is large. The sea must know more than any of us.
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