The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls: Key Poetic Devices

Allegory

An allegory (AL-uh-GO-ree) is a term used to describe a narrative that can be interpreted to reveal two distinct but correlated levels of meaning. A common example of allegory is The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. This narrative tells of a man named Christian who travels from the “City of Destruction” to the “Celestial City.” A reader can enjoy The Pilgrim’s Progress solely for the adventure that unfolds as Christian makes his way in the world. However, a reader can also interpret a second level of meaning, where Christian is an allegorical figure who stands in for all Christian believers. Understood in this way, his journey to the Celestial City allegorizes every Christian’s spiritual journey toward God. In Longfellow’s poem, the story of the traveler is an allegory for the mystery of existence. The traveler mysteriously arrives on the seashore, and we don’t know how they got there or where they came from. The traveler proceeds to the town, and then they disappear just as mysteriously as they arrived. Read in this way, the traveler’s journey from their arrival on shore to their departure from town may be interpreted as an allegory of life and death.

Assonance & Consonance

Assonance and consonance play a major role in Longfellow’s poem, at once elevating the language and helping to conjure a soundscape that echoes the poem’s seaside setting. Assonance and consonance are sibling concepts, in that they both refer to the repetition of certain sounds in adjacent or nearby words. Assonance specifically refers to the repetition of vowel sounds, whereas consonance refers to the repetition of consonant sounds. Longfellow makes ample use of both types of repetition to create a subtle sense of cohesion within individual lines or across multiple lines. Let’s start by looking at examples of assonance in the poem’s opening 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.

Three vowel sounds predominate to give this passage an internal “sonic logic”: I sounds, A sounds, and OW sounds. Longfellow creates a similar effect through his use of consonance in the second stanza (lines 11–15):

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Although D and F sounds appear throughout this passage, it is the S sounds that clearly predominate. S is a type of consonant known as a sibilant (SIH-buh-lent), and it has a soft, soothing sound quality that—in this poem—conjures the gentle susurrations of lapping waves.

Caesura

Many lines in Longfellow’s poem have a strong pause in the middle. This type of strong, mid-line pause is known as a caesura (say-ZHOO-rah), and it’s a very common feature of ancient verse in Greek, Latin, and Old English. Paired with the fact that Longfellow uses an accentual form of meter that resembles much Old English poetry, his frequent use of caesura firmly places the poem in a traditional and ancient lineage. Yet Longfellow’s use of caesura is also significant for the way it helps manipulate the poem’s rhythm, sonically evoking the ceaseless breaking of waves upon the shore. As an example, consider the second stanza (lines 6–10):

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, [pause] the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, [pause] with their soft, [pause] white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, [pause] the tide falls.

If you read these lines aloud and insert an intentional pause after every midline comma (marked in the passage with [pause]), you may notice a rhythmic sense of waves coming into shore. Even more subtly, it’s possible to argue that these and other examples of caesura in the poem evoke that elusive moment when one tide transitions into the other—from rising to falling, or from falling to rising.

Refrain

In poetry, the term refrain refers to any word, phrase, line, or group of lines that gets repeated over the course of a poem. Longfellow opens his poem with a line that repeats in a slightly different form at the end of each of the poem’s three stanzas: “And the ride rises, the tide falls” (lines 5, 10, and 15). Perhaps most obviously, the refrain provides the poem with its title. More importantly, though, and on a thematic level, the refrain also emphasizes the cyclical nature of the sea as it ceaselessly transitions from rising tide to falling tide and back. The constant shifting of the sea may also be understood as symbolizing the cyclicality of natural world more generally. Furthermore, on a formal level, the refrain determines the rhymes for most lines in the poem. Each stanza follows the same rhyme scheme: AABBA. Whereas the B rhymes change in every stanza, all the A rhymes across the entire poem rhyme with “falls.” The refrain is therefore a dominant force in the poem on both thematic and formal levels.

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