“The Sea” by James Reeves

A poem doesn’t have to be complicated to be wonderful.

Poetry can be simple. It can also be quiet profound. It’s often both, at the same time. It gives voice to the world around us, in all its incomprehensible wonder and vastness. It helps us to position ourselves within us, writing hymns and lamentations and sonnets and odes to the starry dynamos of night, the wind whispering through the branches, the loving gaze of a newborn in all their insatiable curiosity.

“The Sea” by English poet James Reeves is a simple but also complex poem reflecting on the ocean at three different times of year. It’s elementary enough to teach the basic principles of poetry to Freshmen/Year 1 students, with its obvious, easily graspable metaphors and lyric rhyme schemes. It remains moving and profound and lovely and playful, though, even after a lifetime of reading. One moment, it’s casting the waves as a giant, grey dog rolling on the beach during the winter. The next it is cold and hungry and dark, gnawing on bones while the night wind howls in an eerie moonlit landscape.

Let “The Sea” serve as a reminder of the beauty of the basic building blocks of poetry. Don’t be afraid to rhyme, but also don’t be afraid to push the boundaries of form and convention. Perhaps “The Sea”‘s most striking and moving feature is its irregular rhythms and rhymes, rolling and tumbling like the scenes its describing. Anthropomorphization and personification, simile and metaphor can be your friend, as well. Poetry can be lyric and romantic and even traditional and still be modern, giving voice to the poetic depths of this confoundingly beautiful, confusing, chaotic world we’re inhabiting.

The sea is a hungry dog,
Giant and grey.
He rolls on the beach all day.
With his clashing teeth and shaggy jaws
Hour upon hour he gnaws
The rumbling, tumbling stones,
And ‘Bones, bones, bones, bones! ‘
The giant sea-dog moans,
Licking his greasy paws.

And when the night wind roars And the moon rocks in the stormy cloud,
He bounds to his feet and snuffs and sniffs,
Shaking his wet sides over the cliffs,
And howls and hollos long and loud.

But on quiet days in May or June,
When even the grasses on the dune
Play no more their reedy tune,
With his head between his paws
He lies on the sandy shores,
So quiet, so quiet, he scarcely snores.

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