The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls: Important Quotes Explained

The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveller hastens toward the town.
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

These five lines constitute the poem’s opening stanza. This stanza both begins and ends with the refrain that will repeat elsewhere in the poem, at the close of the second and third stanzas. Repeating the refrain twice in the first single stanza helps establish the centrality of the tide’s rise and fall as a symbolic presence in the poem. In addition to establishing the symbolism of the tides, the opening stanza also introduces a key opposition in the poem. This opposition plays out between the nonhuman environment and the human traveler. The first two lines of the stanza refer solely to elements in the environment, including the shifting tides, the darkening sky, and the calling birds. The next two lines shift focus to a mysterious traveler. Although these lines still refer to “the sea-sands damp and brown,” the speaker centers attention on the traveler’s action. The speaker further emphasizes the distinction between nonhuman and human elements through the stanza’s AABBA rhyme scheme. The A lines focus on the nonhuman elements, whereas the B lines focus on the human elements.

The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands.

These lines (8–9) appear in the second stanza, and they offer a rare moment of personification, which comes when the speaker describes waves as if they were humans with “soft, white hands.” In a poem that otherwise emphasizes the opposition between nonhuman and human, this moment is significant for the way it brings the two closer together. That is, the speaker’s personification of the waves blurs the boundary between the nonhuman and the human. And yet, at the same time the speaker effectively reaffirms the human/nonhuman distinction. They do so through the very image they are describing, which involves the waves erasing the track of footprints the traveler left in the sand. Whereas all traces of the traveler rapidly disappear from the world, the nonhuman realm of the tides remains forcefully present. Unlike the traveler, whose presence in the world is ephemeral and fleeting, the tides are eternal.

The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

The speaker closes the poem with these lines (13–15), in which they describe how the traveler disappears from the town without a trace. The traveler’s disappearance is as mysterious as their initial appearance. We readers have no context regarding who the traveler is or where they came from. It’s possible that they arrived on the shore by boat—but if that’s the case, then from whence did the boat set sail? We simply don’t know. Likewise, we have no idea about where the speaker might have gone when they disappeared before daybreak. The mystery of the traveler’s appearance and disappearance opens the poem to an allegorical reading. According to such an allegorical reading, the traveler is an archetypal figure (or “everyman”) who enters the world at birth and departs at death. In this regard, it’s notable that these lines feature the first presence of full daylight in the poem. The poem opened as the previous day was waning. The traveler trudged along the shore at twilight, then disappeared from the town sometime in the dead of night. The opposition between day (light) and night (darkness) provides an additional key to the poem’s allegory of life and death.