Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls

The tide rises, the tide falls,

Curlew timing

Curlews are wading birds that feed at low tide and call at dusk. This isn't decorative—it tells you the tide is going out as night 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.
Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea in the darkness calls and calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,

Personification shift

The waves suddenly have hands. This is the only moment in the poem where nature becomes human—right when it erases human traces.

Efface

Not 'erase' or 'wash away'—'efface' means to make something lose its face or identity. The traveler's existence is being unmade.

Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;

Hostler

A hostler (or ostler) is a stable worker who tends horses at an inn. The traveler's horse is waiting, but he'll never ride it again.

Nevermore

Written 1879, forty years after Poe's 'The Raven.' Longfellow knew exactly what word he was using here.

The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

What the Refrain Does

The tide rises, the tide falls appears five times, and it means something different each time you hear it. First time: it's just description. Second time: you realize it's continuing while the traveler disappears. Third time: it's the poem's answer to death—nature doesn't stop.

Longfellow wrote this at 72, three years before his death. His second wife had burned to death in 1861 when her dress caught fire. His daughter died in 1848. By 1879, he'd watched most of his generation die. This isn't a young man's meditation on mortality.

The refrain is in anapestic meter (da-da-DUM), which creates a rocking rhythm that literally sounds like waves. But notice: every other line breaks that pattern. > The traveller hastens toward the town uses iambic meter (da-DUM), creating rhythmic tension—the human rushing against nature's steady pulse. The meter tells you who wins.

The Traveler's Disappearance

The traveler appears in line 4, and by line 14 he's gone forever. That's it. Nine lines of existence in a thirty-line poem. Longfellow doesn't tell you how he dies—drowning, heart attack, murder, old age in bed. It doesn't matter.

What matters: the sea erases his footprints before we even know he's dead. The waves with their 'soft, white hands' are gentle, not violent. Nature isn't malicious. It's indifferent, which is worse.

The morning brings the hostler calling for horses, the steeds stamping in their stalls—life continues in the town. The day returns. But the traveler doesn't. That asymmetry is the whole point: cycles continue, individuals don't. The tide doesn't pause. The curlew doesn't stop calling. Your absence changes nothing.