Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

John Frederick Nims’ "Seashore" juxtaposes the timeless, relentless movement of the ocean with the ephemeral lives of those who gather at its edge, constructing a layered meditation on mortality, vanity, and the weight of history. The poem moves between the vast perspective of the sea, which has witnessed the rise and fall of civilizations, and the intimate, fleeting moments of people enjoying the beach. The contrast between the ocean’s permanence and human transience underscores the poem’s central tension.

The opening lines frame the ocean as a great museum of lost nations, a vast repository of history where the green vision of the drowned—suggesting those lost to shipwrecks, conquests, and forgotten civilizations—behold a fantasy of prow and sunk sequoia. The ocean, in this vision, is both a graveyard and a place of strange beauty, where the remains of past worlds—both human and natural—are preserved in an eerie underwater landscape. The image of rotary windows of the ocean rolled reinforces the sense of ceaseless motion, as if history itself is being turned over by the waves, endlessly rewritten.

Against this grand historical sweep, the next lines introduce a mundane, contemporary beach scene: to where the extended redheads, one by one, / Were stripping their almond torsos to the sun. This sudden shift in focus is jarring but deliberate; Nims moves from the mythic to the immediate, highlighting the contrast between what the ocean remembers and what human beings choose to forget in their pursuit of leisure. The phrase extended redheads suggests both a physical description of sunbathers and a subtle allusion to classical beauty—perhaps invoking the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of the red-haired muse. Their almond torsos reflect a polished aesthetic, emphasizing the surface appeal of the present moment.

The following stanza introduces children at play, constructing ditch and fortress and attempting to civilize the sand. This playful phrasing suggests both the innocence of childhood and a deeper irony: the act of building sand structures parallels the rise and fall of real civilizations, all of which, like sandcastles, are ultimately washed away. The children are beneficent tots, suggesting their well-meaning but ultimately futile attempts to impose order on the impermanent. The image of them retreating as blue Cassandras of the wave is particularly striking—Cassandra, the doomed prophetess of Troy, saw the future but was never believed. These children, as mini-Cassandras, seem to recognize the futility of their efforts, sensing that the ocean will reclaim their work, yet they continue nonetheless.

Nims then turns to the adults, who are locked in their own forms of distraction and self-deception. Fathers loll on the beach, dreaming of financial success, their wizard shoulders bent as they contemplate the Sangreals of assured percent. The allusion to the Holy Grail (Sangreal) humorously casts financial security as a kind of misguided spiritual quest, suggesting that for these men, wealth and stability are their ultimate, perhaps unattainable, salvation.

The poem shifts into a more melancholic register with the introduction of the elderly and the widow. The old lay out their faded veins to suck / Thin vigor from the clinics of the sun, a haunting image of aging bodies attempting to absorb vitality from the sunlight. The widow, dressed in crimson—a color of both passion and mourning—waits, longing to trade / All her new seasons for one older one. The idea of exchanging a future for the past underscores the irreversibility of time; she is surrounded by life but unable to escape her grief. Her yesterdays run by with lighted lips—a phrase that captures the way memories seem vivid, almost living, even as they remain unattainable. Meanwhile, she lies there, a sad tomorrow with fat hips, suggesting both physical aging and emotional weight. The juxtaposition of the lively past with the static present enhances the poem’s meditation on time’s cruel march forward.

Next, Nims presents a vision of young women whose flesh [is] wiser than they, a phrase that implies an instinctual, unconscious knowledge of attraction and desire that their minds have yet to fully understand. Their bright thongs worry the blue police, suggesting both their boldness and the subtle tension between sexuality and social restriction. These young women traverse serene the ordeal of the sky, untouched by existential concerns, while their lips sainted—little wings of dime cerise glow with the transient glamour of youth. The word sainted ironically elevates their beauty to something sacred, while dime cerise reminds us of its cheap, fleeting nature.

In the final lines, Nims shifts once more, introducing a more ethereal, almost mystical perspective. The silver porches of the soul are shaded by immortal flora, an image that suggests an eternal, spiritual beauty beyond the transient pleasures of the beach. The phrase by cord from heaven hung, such pens are writing / Bright comment on the margin of the seas presents a cosmic vision of fate being recorded alongside the water’s edge. This celestial perspective dwarfs human concerns, reinforcing the insignificance of personal vanity and ambition in the face of nature’s vastness.

The poem concludes with a reference to the dead, whose hanging gardens / Are rich with many a fairer limb than these. The phrase hanging gardens suggests both the lost wonders of antiquity and the floating, suspended nature of the afterlife. The final lines—The fortunate dead, in country waters laid—suggest a quiet resignation to mortality. The dead, resting in the sea, have escaped the endless cycles of longing and decay that trouble the living.

Throughout "Seashore", Nims masterfully oscillates between the trivial and the profound, the transient and the eternal. The beach serves as a microcosm of human folly—where people chase beauty, wealth, and fleeting pleasure—while the ocean, vast and implacable, carries the memory of civilizations long past. The juxtaposition of the present-day sunbathers with echoes of history and mythology reinforces the poem’s meditation on time’s relentless passage. In the end, the sea remains, its waves rolling over the temporary pursuits of humankind, preserving the dead while erasing the footprints of the living.

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