Most beach poems are sad. Most poems are sad. Most lives are sad. ‘The reason that there are so many depressed people,’ writes UD‘s guru, Adam Phillips, ‘is that life is so depressing for many people. It’s not a mystery.‘

After a morning reading lots of beach poems, UD finds herself charmed by this old-fashioned one – strict end rhyme and pretty strict meter, written in 1913 by a guy you’ve never heard of – Ridgely Torrence – and titled “Santa Barbara Beach.” It could have been any beach – Nungwi, Sarandë – cuz almost no beach poems are specific to the sand where the poet happens to have sunk his/her feet. Poetic beaches are beaches whose vast uncontrollable deathless sublimity catalyzes thoughts of human frailty, brevity, fatality. On a big beach under a bright sun we stand out in dramatic relief in all our littleness against the massive depth and breadth of the ocean, and this evokes thoughts of our sweetness and poignancy, to be sure – we are drawn to the ocean’s shore because we are drawn to beauty, might, heat, majesty, eternality, which is a very nice thing about us qua humans – but it mainly evokes thoughts of our brief befuddled plunge into being.

I’ll interrupt your reading of this poem with commentary. Read it without interruption here.

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Santa Barbara Beach

by Ridgely Torrence

Now while the sunset offers,
Shall we not take our own:
The gems, the blazing coffers,
The seas, the shores, the throne?

[A spectacular sunset lights up a jeweled world of riches, possibilities, and the poet invites us to take our share. This feels like a world we own, and this is the moment to grasp it with joy.]

The sky-ships, radiant-masted,
Move out, bear low our way.
Oh, Life was dark while it lasted,
Now for enduring day.

[The rayed sinking sun is like a brilliantly lit ship, the rays the masts, and its lowness on the horizon feels like a generous bow toward us, the owners of the world, a bow that lights up our path along the strand. In an ironic reversal, the poet describes daylight life as dark, and sunset life as light — in the harsh light of typical day, we see and feel the paucity of our spiritual surroundings. But in the gleaming disseminated light of sunset, we feel our earth and ourselves emblazoned in a low enveloping flame, a flame that feels as though it will last forever.]

Now with the world far under,
To draw up drowning men
And show them lands of wonder
Where they may build again.

[Day is done, its world is subdued, and the spiritual light of sunset can now transport us from our “drowned” lives (We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/Till human voices wake us, and we drown.) to a higher world of new possibilities.]

There earthly sorrow falters,
There longing has its wage;
There gleam the ivory altars
Of our lost pilgrimage.

[This stanza elaborates upon the rich world of human and spiritual possibilities illuminated by the setting sun, a sun which puts the daylight world “under” and illuminates a new world of new life. Sorrow, longing, lostness – all that we feel in our daylight lives, vanishes in the brilliant promise of this moment.]

Swift flame—then shipwrecks only
Beach in the ruined light;
Above them reach up lonely
The headlands of the night.

[Sudden nasty transition here: Sunset’s mystic flame lasted only moments, and in its ruined light we see “what’s really always there” — the oncoming black of deathly night. Night is even darker, if you will, than day.]

A hurt bird cries and flutters
Her dabbled breast of brown;
The western wall unshutters
To fling one last rose down.

[These are images of beautiful natural things – the bird, the rose – in their last moments. The oncoming black wall at least lets one last petal down for us.]

A rose, a wild light after—
And life calls through the years,
“Who dreams my fountain’s laughter
Shall feed my wells with tears.”

[In life, we have epiphanies – moments of illumination, wild light, when in extreme beauty and meaning, the world calls to us.

But what does it say? We who love life and hear within it the laughter of joy and spirit, are doomed – post-sunset – to weep oceans of tears. The more we expect of existence, the more betrayed we will be.

“Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof in the end come despondency and madness.”]