Whether you’re near the shore or a landlocked poetry-lover, it’s hard to deny the powerful imagery of the sea. These mesmerizing verses invite you to contemplate the complexities, emotions, and profound experiences that shape our existence, leaving you with a renewed sense of introspection. Here Dickinson inaugurates what will become a compelling strand in her poetry: the contrast between the power and distance associated with the sea and the fragility and endurance of birds across these distances.

She earned her BA and MFA from the Ohio State University and was a Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.Ponder the profound connection between life’s fragility and the eternal vastness of the ocean with these verses that weave a captivating tapestry of emotions. It is tangible, visual, and with the right metaphor, it’s also all-encompassing and ultimately mesmerizing. Onomatopoeia is used at the end of the first lines and the same onomatopoeia again at the last line of each verse. This well-known ballad poem tells of the beautiful, painful memory of a lost love from the speaker’s youth. Sea glass is glass that has been weathered by the ocean, which turns the broken glass from bottles into natural frosted glass.

Set sail on a poetic odyssey where the vast expanse of the ocean becomes a metaphor for the journey of life.Invoking the “boundless” and the “limitless,” Nezhukumatathil sets out a simple, yet profound, argument about our relations with the natural world: the more we feel the ocean’s embrace, the sooner we sense its particular “hum” everywhere. The poem takes the sea as analogous to space under human control on land only to dismantle the analogy, leaving its readers with the discomfiting sense that Dickinson’s metaphors have served to illuminate precisely what they cannot contain. You can read as many as you want, and also submit your own poems to share your writings with all our poets, members, and visitors. Dickinson invokes the size and power of the sea in this poem, but here it is in service of what might initially seem to be an idealistic conceit: the entire cosmos, even the unfathomable leagues of the sea, can be absorbed into human consciousness. As our attentions descend below the surface, we encounter a different sort of sea—a world of hatchetfish and narwhals where “colors humans have not yet named glow in caves made from black coral and clamshell.