This one does not seem improvised but is written, like late Shakespeare, in iambic lines moving irregularly between tetrameter and pentameter, which gives the poem a solemn and deliberate sound. Such an undecorated statement may sound like the bemused self- deprecation of the Lunch Poems, but it has more disastrous consequences. The rhetoric of this poetry subsumes the jokes and the slightly grotesque images in a quiet yearning despair. After the sun has started sinking, the poem is able to accommodate even the offer of his will to the Harbormaster. Before I read Brad Gooch's book, I couldn't make out if the poem was addressed to a lover or to God.
Waves are the medium for a ship as the air is the medium for a human being.
They exist in an eternity different from God's, and different again from the life-span of the ship or the man, and opposed to both, in a sense. That is the way things are, and O'Hara had better trust in the sanity of his body. It appears that both the light-hearted hedonism of other poems and the stoicism of this are equally based on this common sense, this steady health of mind. I am always tying up and then deciding to depart. In storms and at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide around my fathomless arms, I am unable to understand the forms of my vanity or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder in my hand and the sun sinking.