Poem of the week: The Tides by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

‘Insurgent waters’ … Longfellow wrote The Tides at a time when he was probably still mourning the death of his second wife, who died after her dress caught fire. Photograph: Steven Senne/AP

Carol Rumens - The Guardian

Monday 21 September 2015 

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.

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