A Question
A Question - meaning Summary
Anticipation as Immersion
The poem explores what it means to be satisfied in love through sustained ocean imagery. Frost presents satisfaction not as complacency but as active immersion: the lover must embrace risk, plunge into deep water, struggle ashore and remain awake to desire. Maternal return and traces left in sand suggest continuity between longing, memory, and renewal. Satisfaction is portrayed as readiness to be partly enveloped and to open "sublittoral doors" so that what belongs to the self and the sea can meet. The tone balances caution with insistence on aliveness.
Read Complete AnalysesWhat is satisfaction? If a woman about to love thinks of elsewhere islands she is foolish. To remain alive, anticipatory unafraid of auguries she must bathe in deep waters. She must be thrown from the jetty and feel the cobwebbed weeds reach for her ankles. She must swim with thrashing strokes to shore where her mother waits with young eyes. She must watch the heart urchin’s desert tracks in the sand and be as alive at night as she is when desired. She must be embedded in or partly covered by sand so that when she opens sublittoral doors she receives the sea that is due.
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