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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Human versus Environment

The primary motif in the poem relates to the opposition between humans and the wider natural world. Significantly, Longfellow built this opposition into the poem on a structural level. Each of the poem’s three stanzas has the same basic form: they all have five four-beat lines that follow a strict AABBA rhyme scheme. Whereas the A lines in this scheme focus chiefly on the environment, the B lines focus on the traveler who’s passing through that environment. As an example, consider the first stanza (lines 1–5):

     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.

Lines 1, 2, and 5 all relate to the natural world, focusing specifically on the tides, the sky, and the sounds of bird calls. These lines are all linked through their A rhymes. By contrast, lines 3 and 4 introduce the traveler who’s hurrying along the shore toward the town. These lines clearly stand apart from the rest of the stanza, since their B rhymes form a distinct couplet. On a formal level, then, Longfellow establishes an opposition between the human traveler and the nonhuman environment. Furthermore, the fact that the A lines outnumber the B lines in each stanza clearly indicates that the environment has the upper hand.

Day versus Night

Longfellow’s poem takes place over the course of a single night, beginning with the light fading at dusk and ending with the light returning at dawn. The poem therefore places day and night in a symbolically significant opposition. Perhaps the most obvious interpretation of this opposition would associate daytime with life and nighttime with death. Such an interpretation makes sense, especially if we read the poem as an allegory for living and dying. The traveler walks along a beach during the day (i.e., living), enters the town at twilight (i.e., dying), and disappears without a trace before the next day dawns (i.e., dead). However, the opposition between day and night can also be understood more generally as an opposition between light and darkness. Light is associated with illumination and visibility, whereas darkness is associated with obscurity and disappearance. These shades of meaning are also present in the poem. Finally, it’s worth mentioning that the cyclical passage between day and night recalls the cyclical nature of the tides referenced in the title and throughout the poem.

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