The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.
As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.
The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be—
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.
They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?
This poem came to mind as I walked the beach on Sanibel Island one morning last week, though my fellow-strollers were more likely to be looking straight down than into the fog that gusted from the Gulf. Sanibel is famous for its shells—most islands here run north/south, but Sanibel’s underbelly bulges east/west, and currents dump a midden’s worth of Turkey Wings, Atlantic Giant Cockles, and Fighting Conches each day. Serious shellers work early, after tides, which are not like clockwork New England tides, but come one or three or five times a day. Or they search other local beaches, like Bunche Beach, which was Fort Myer’s segregated beach during the last century, and does not attract many tourists.
The confluence of air, water, and earth—fire, too, if it’s a sunny day—enchants. In a writing exercise I gave to an Intro to Creative Writing class in Boston, I asked students to write 2 paragraphs about a perfect day. At least half of them set their stories at the beach. Then I asked them to swap papers and ruin their classmate’s day by introducing a new character to the scene. I almost feel that this is what Frost is doing, by choosing the third person plural rather than other possible points of view, in “Neither Far Out Nor In Deep.”
I used to talk to students about a poem’s “lyric moment.” Where is the speaker at the moment s/he utters the poem? What point of view does s/he use? Who is being spoken to? It seems that Frost is on the scene with “the people along the sand,” and, like them, he’s there “all day.” But he’s not one of them. It’s “they,” not “we.” I reexamine my first assumption—is the speaker looking at a painting? But the ship and the gull in the second stanza exist in time—the “wetter ground” changes as tides sweep the shore. I notice how Frost doesn’t repeat “sand” and that sand is one element of glass-making, and that “watch” is a nautical term.
And I notice how the tone of the poem would shift from profound despair to rueful acceptance if the last stanza were written in the first rather than third person plural. In the first person singular, the stanza would become self-pitying and sentimental. In the second person, it’s didactic and hortatory. The poem is comprehended by its point of view, rather than through imagery or setting. In fact, the standard-ish beach imagery in the second stanza—a boat, a bird—reads as if Frost is offering his bona fides: “I am the man; I suffered; I was there.” But the reader must infer “I suffered” from the tone created in the final stanza by the use of the third person plural. Frost paradoxically pries open a space for his suffering through the countless “watches” he has experienced or witnessed by excluding himself from the dubious “truth” of the scene before him. If life’s a beach, the metaphor is more hopeless than a casual Sanibel stroller would like to believe.