Four lines of tidy rhyme, and then the sea breaks in. That is the odd shape of this text. It begins as a miniature epitaph, a sentence fit for a gravestone, and turns into a long, rocking lament for someone lost to a shipwreck. The two halves speak in very different voices, and much of the interest lies in what happens when they sit side by side.
The epitaph is built from the vocabulary of togetherness. The friends' lives were "undivided," their bones must not be "parted," their hearts were "single-hearted." Every key word denies separation, and the rhyme does the same work. Two couplets (undivided/glided, parted/single-hearted) lock the lines together in pairs, as the friends are to be locked in one grave. The verb "glided" is a quiet, careful choice. Death here is a smooth slide rather than a collapse, and it slips water into the poem before the sea has been mentioned. The tone is that of a request: "let their memory be," "let not their bones be parted." The speaker sounds like someone instructing the living, not mourning aloud.
Then the lyric begins, and the feeling becomes more personal. The first stanza compresses a whole tragedy into a few lines: "This morn thy gallant bark / Sailed on a sunny sea: / 'Tis noon, and tempests dark / Have wrecked it on the lee." The shift from "morn" to "noon" and from "sunny" to "dark" happens across a single colon. The poem skips the storm itself and gives us only the reversal, which makes the loss feel sudden. "Gallant" lends the boat, and by extension the person addressed as "thou," a touch of youth and courage. The lines are short, about three beats each, and they rock like the water they describe. Then the cry "Ah woe! ah woe!" breaks the pattern in the middle of the stanza.
The rhyme scheme changes shape as each stanza goes on. The first four lines alternate tidily, but the second four loosen, and words like "come" and "pillow" go unanswered. One sound, though, is fixed in place. In every stanza the line "The Spirits of the deep" is matched by the last line: *sleep*, *keep*, *weep*. Those closing words trace a small movement from the dead to the living. First comes the drowned person's "eternal sleep," then the speaker's "lonely watch I keep," then the speaker's promise to "forever weep." The mourner's grief is made to last as long as the sleeper's rest.
The imagery of the sea is the poem's most interesting move. It destroyed the ship, yet it is also the nurse. The drowned person is "cradled on the billow" and given a "seaweed pillow," so that death becomes a kind of bedtime. The Spirits of the deep and the Sea-nymphs are not villains either. They chant a "dirge" and "raise a wail of sorrow," so the natural world joins the mourning instead of gloating over its victim. The stanzas also move through the senses. The first is about the event, the second about the place ("beside the knelling surge," where "knelling" turns the waves into a tolling bell), and the third about sound: "I hear a loud lament," "Echo's voice," "O list! O list!" The speaker, the only living human here, hears grief come back from "Ocean's caverns," as if even the echo were grieving.
Read together, the two parts pull against each other. The epitaph celebrates friends who are not divided, even in death. The lyric ends with one person asleep beneath the waves and another keeping watch alone on the shore. Nothing in the text says outright that the two pieces belong together, but the contrast is hard to ignore. The wish for an undivided grave sits uneasily beside a loneliness that cannot be shared.
The poem is worth reading for that tension, and for its range. It moves from a few lines of inscription-like calm to a song that uses refrain, echo and mythic sea-spirits to turn private grief into a whole landscape of mourning.