The diversity of Dickinson’s treatment of the sea in the middle portion of her career is exemplified in several poems written, according to Franklin, in 1863. In the earliest poems, she seems primarily invested in noting the sea’s power and status as a central instance of the sublime (including both as an obstacle for the aspiring soul to overcome and as a model for that aspiring soul); it does not take long for her to work towards subtler psychological shading on the one hand and more physical detail on the other.

Desire is also the main current of The European Eel, Steve Ely’s lush recreation of the incredible transatlantic migration eels undertake to their spawning grounds in the Sargasso Sea.

Time and time again, nature has proven that the deepest parts of the ocean are more serene and holds a lot of secrecy, that’s why people dive deep to have a taste of these mysteries. Many deep short ocean poems throw emphasis on the truth that the ocean aids in the restoration of a person’s physiological, intellectual, and emotional well-being. The river is a ‘god’, but the sea has ‘many gods’ and ‘many voices’: a polytheistic force of nature.

Even where she uses metaphors from the shore—“undulating rooms,” to refer to an example that I have discussed at length above—the point is the inadequacy of the metaphor, the degree to which oceanic waves are more than the human world that seeks them out as analogies, and to which the analogies themselves expose their own shortcomings. Sensual and vivid, [Nezhukumatathil’s] poems invite us deep into the water, where ‘colors humans have / not yet named glow in caves made from black coral and clamshell. The sea remains up until her last years a reminder of the limits of human desire and potential and of the necessity of confronting and acknowledging these limits, which not even a benevolent deity offers the possibility of easily transcending by this stage in Dickinson’s career. Ocean poems can be dedicated to portraying the heart of the ocean, as well as analogies for romance and trauma, among other things.More than that, the ocean has played a role in the history of many cultures, making it a setting that is both intimately personal, and vastly universal. She is currently working on her own postcolonial novel and hopes that someday it will see the light of day outside of her computer screen. with the onomatopoeia (sounds they make), commas at the end of each line except for the last line which has an exclamation mark because of onomatopoeia (as opposed to a full stop). In this poem, longer than most of Dickinson’s works, she moves between lighthearted images of a walk with her dog on the shore and “Mermaids in the Basement,” and the grimmer possibility of being drowned by the incoming tide.