Introduction
Tides, and terms like ‘high tide’, ‘low tide’, ‘turn of the tide’ are commonly used as metaphors in many forms of writing – not least in poetry. Those are not the focus of this list.
Here I list a selection of poems, and sometimes collections of poems; that deal with tides, and tidal places, as physical processes and entities. In other words, poems which are about tides themselves, tidal places, and tidal processes, most obviously tidal rise and fall.
As stated elsewhere in this blog, tides and tidal places are very evocative, mysterious and moving spectacles, so it is no surprise that these been the muse for poets of various stripes in differing eras.
There happens to be three significant collections of poetry focused on The Severn Estuary and its tides which were all published in 2009. See Clarke, Gross; and Oswald.
There is a separate page on Tides in Literature and Folklore on this blog here.
This page is divided into collections, narrative poems and individual poems (whole or fragments). New entries are added at the top as they are found. There is no order or grouping apart from that.
A few entries are collections of poems, some are longer narrative poems, some just extracts.
Some are presented as images – some as copied text.
A link and author information are given where possible. (Updated 20 08 2026).
Collections
The Water Table: Philip Gross.
This is a brilliant collection of poems about the Severn Estuary, and a life lived near it. It won the T. S. Elliot prize for poetry in 2010.
“A powerful and ambiguous body of water lies at the heart of these poems, with shoals and channels that change with the forty-foot tide. Even the name is fluid – from one shore, the Bristol Channel, from the other Mor Hafren, the Severn Sea. Philip Gross’ meditations move with subtle steps between these shifting grounds and those of the man-made world, the aging body and that ever-present mystery, the self. Admirers of his work know each new collection is a new stage; this one marks a crossing into a new questioning, new clarity and depth.” Amazon summary here.
From a review by Sameer Rahim “The Water Table, though it deals with a variety of subjects, continually flows back to the Bristol Channel, the rhythm of the tides and water’s physical and metaphoric properties.“
The last poem, Severn Song, is on-line in full here
Here is the first stanza
The Severn was brown and the Severn was blue –
not this-then-that, not either-or,
no mixture. Two things can be true.
The hills were clouds and the mist was a shore.
A Recipe for Water: Gillian Clarke.
“The drop of water on the tongue, writes Gillian Clarke, ‘was the first word in the world’, and the language of water is the element in which these poems live. Ocean currents create histories and cultures – the port cities of Cardiff and Mumbai; myths are born where great rivers have their source high in the mountains. A bottle of spring water contains the mineral elements of life; we can read the earth’s deep history in arctic ice. We share the rhythms of migrations in the pull of tides and seasons through rivers and estuaries. In her first collection since becoming the National Poet of Wales in 2008, Gillian Clarke explores water as memory and meaning, the bearer of stories that well up from a personal and collective past to return us to the language of the imagination in which we first named the world.” Source and more info here.
This collection ranges over various aspects of water, but there is series of wonderful poems about the tides – particularly those in the Severn Estuary – Cardiff. The messages are deeply ecological, with warnings about what losses a Severn Barrage would bring – and the losses the Taff Barrage has brought. The poems are steeped in history and place.
Some of these poems are viewable in full on Amazon here
In 2008 Gillian Clarke was appointed National Poet of Wales and in 2010 she was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
Beyond the Map: Lesley Harrison
Published in 2012. A lovely book of poems very much about place, the sea, and the north.
From the collection.
(Narrative Poems
A Sleepwalk on the Severn: Alice Oswald
‘This is not a play. This is a poem in several registers, set at night on the Severn Estuary. Its subject is moonrise, which happens five times in five different forms: new moon, half moon, full moon, no moon and moon reborn. Various characters, some living, some dead, all based on real people from the Severn catchment, talk towards the moment of moonrise and are changed by it. The poem, which was written for the 2009 festival of the Severn, aims to record what happens when the moon moves over us – its effect on water and its effect on voices.’
A Sleepwalk on the Severn is a poem for several voices, set at night on the Severn Estuary. Its subject is moonrise, which happens five times in five different forms: new moon, half moon, full moon, no moon and moon reborn. Various characters, some living, some dead – all based on real people from the Severn catchment – talk towards the moment of moonrise and are changed by it. Commissioned for the 2009 festival of the Severn, Alice Oswald’s breathtakingly original new work aims to record what happens when the moon moves over the sublunary world: its effect on water and its effect on language.’ Source and more info here
Alice Oswald is one of the UK’s most respected poets who has published collections of poems about various aspects of landscape and nature. Tides (and the moon) and the rhythms they bring to human and non-human life in landscape run through this book.
Peter Grimes: George Crabb
In Crabbes’ narrative tragic poem Peter Grimes, famously rendered as an opera by Benjamin Britten, the tidal marshes become a place of isolation and desolation.
The draining and creping tide, and the unknowableness and openness of often vast intertidal landscapes can be a spatio-material medium for feelings of angst, threat, fear and dread. In Crabbes’ narrative tragic poem Peter Grimes the tidal marshes become a place of isolation and desolation.
Thus by himself compelled to live each day,
To wait for certain hours the tide’s delay;
At the same times the same dull views to see,
The water only, when the tides were high,
When low, the mud-half covered and half-dry;
There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide,
There hang his head, and view the lazy tide
In its hot slimy channel slowly glide
Individual Poems
Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbour: Sylvia Plath
Here, on the shore in Scotland, Plath turned her melancholic gaze on intertidal land at town tide finding it to be raw and visceral space.
Dawn tide stood dead low. I smelt
Mud stench, shell guts, gulls leavings.
Almost Equinox: Sarah Maguire
This is the title poem of Sarah Maguire’s 2015 collection. This poem is about the tidal Thames. The cover of the collection follows that.
Here are the first 6 stanzas. There are eight more.
Mussels At Low Tide: Joolz Sparkes
From The Poetry Shed website here
“Joolz Sparkes was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize 2010, and Cinnamon Press pamphlet competition 2016, and is published in Magma, Shooter Literary Magazine, Great weather for MEDIA, The Persisters Zine and South Bank Poetry magazine. She has featured at Ledbury Poetry festival, was Poet in Residence at Leicester Square tube station and is a member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen.”
The Bay: Clare Sawtell
from the 2017 collection Soft Notes and Depatures.
Thanks to Clare for permission to reproduce this poem here. It is lovely.
Water Mark: Clare Sawtell
More about Clare and her poems can be seen here.
The Moose: Elizabeth Bishop
Here are the first four stanzas of The Moose – a beautiful evocation of a tidal landscape
For Grace Bulmer Bowers
From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,
where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;
where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats’
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;
on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches,
Elizabeth Bishop, ‘one of America’s most important poets’. See here. Poetry Foundation.
Whole poem here
Severn Estuary ABC: Peter Finch
From the collection Poems for Ghosts; Seren Books; 1991
Peter Finch has also written Edging the Estuary. A kind of psychogeography exploration of the Severn Estuary.
The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The tide rises, the tide 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, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
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;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
(1879). Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807-1882
Sea Fever: John Masefield
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.
I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
1902. John Masefield, 1878–1967, was the British Poet Laureate from 1930 until his death in 1967. Many of his poems, and other writings, had sea themes.
The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare (or the Hag of Breare)
Anonymous (10th century)
The ancient Irish poem The Hag of Beara focuses much more on the ebb as a metaphor for dwindling power and vitality. On the Beara Peninsula in the far southwestern part of Ireland, there is a strange outcrop of rock which appears to be shaped like a woman’s face gazing out to the sea. This is the Caelleach Bhearra, The Hag of Beara, whom local tradition calls the “Shaper of the Land.”
This is a long Irish lament about youth and aging with the flood and ebb of the tide as a persisting metaphor throughout. The ceasless comings and goings of the sea as the tide are contrasted with sadness, with the ebb to memory, place, power, beauty, love, wealth and so on, that age and time bring.
The poem opens
The Old Woman of Beare said this when senility had aged her:
Ebb tide has come to me as the sea;
old age makes me yellow;
though I may grieve thereat,
it approaches its food joyfully.
The last four verses are
It is wholly sad
(man is the basest of creatures)
that ebb was not seen
as the flood had been.
(v 26 and 27)
There are three floods
which approach the fort of Ard Ruide:
a flood of warriors, a flood of steeds,
a flood of the greyhounds owned by Lugaid’s sons.
The flood-wave
and that of swift ebb:
what the flood-wave brings you
the ebb-wave carries out of your hand.
It closes
It is well for an island of the great sea:
flood comes to it after its ebb;
as for me,
I expect no flood after ebb to come to me
Today there is scarcely
a dwelling-place I could recognize;
what was in flood
is all ebbing.
Full version here
Various other versions of this can also be found
Seamarks: St. John Perse
Written in Franch as Amers, this is a collection of poetry published in 1957 by French writer Saint-John Perse, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature three years later.
It is a long, complex, and mysterious work written, or translated in, what one commontator said is an ‘ultra-fanciful style’. Source here.
“As the poem progresses, it transitions from a focus on the bustling life of a nameless seaport to the vast, impersonal sea, embodying a journey from the personal to the universal. Despite its complexities, “Seamarks” resonates with readers who share a fascination for the sea, inviting them to appreciate its beauty and the poet’s profound love for it.” Source here.
This extract of the sea, and night, ‘hunting’ up the estuaries I found striking.
Tidal Cultures 