The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls Man and the Natural World Quotes

There is life and death in these opening lines. The falling tide and the twilight suggest death, while the curlew's call suggests life. This little juxtaposition foreshadows the poem's later stanzas, where the traveler's death will be contrasted with nature's everlasting life.

For the second time now, we learn that the tide rises and that the tide falls. The repetition of this line throughout the poem as a refrain makes the rising and falling of the tide seem like an eternal process that will go on until… pretty much the end of time.

We're dealing with a personified nature in this poem. The "darkness" descends almost like some kind of killer dragon, and the sea is calling to somebody. The traveler is becoming less active while the natural world is becoming more active. This foreshadows nature's takeover in the next couple of lines.

The waves have soft white hands, and we get the impression that the natural world is a gentle, motherly figure. At the same time, those white hands are "effacing" the traveler's footprints (getting rid of all trace of his existence). Symbolically speaking, the natural world takes over. It keeps going, while the traveler disappears.

These lines in the poem's final stanza are the speaker's most direct statement about the permanence of nature and the shortness of human life. Check out how nature is doing stuff (the morning is breaking, the day is returning), but the traveler isn't doing anything. He's dead, and can't come back, but the world keeps on going.