The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls

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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published Ultima Thule, his second-to-last poetry collection, in 1880. The Latin phrase “ultima Thule” references a mythic island thought to exist at the world’s most northerly point. More generally, the phrase refers to any distant and unknown region at the furthest limit of what’s discoverable. Longfellow published this collection near the end of his life, when he was certainly thinking about his own mortality. As such, many critics have read his allusion to “ultima Thule” as a symbolic reference to that furthest horizon of existence: death. “The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls” is a poem that appears midway through Ultima Thule, and it is very much about death. The poem’s impersonal, third-person speaker recounts a mysterious and somber story that, in an abstract way, mimics the traditional narrative of the “hero’s journey.” The story concerns an anonymous traveler who walks along the seashore at dusk, making their way to the nearby town. The waves on the beach erase the traveler’s footprints in the sand, and by the time the town wakes the following morning, the traveler has disappeared without a trace. All the while, the tides ceaselessly rise and fall, symbolizing the constancy of change and the smallness of an individual life.