Edna St. Vincent Millay’s speaker is stuck in an urban world of noise and light, cut off from the coastal Maine landscape she loves. She searches her heart and finds not a single dramatic sorrow but a deep weariness: she is tired of words, people, and city life, and she desperately wants the sea. The poem moves through vivid memories—salt spray, surf, wild sweet-peas, groaning piers, mussels, gulls, and the turning tide—as she imagines how happy she would be to feel and touch those things again. The repeated “wanting” and “if I could” create a restless, aching mood. She is not merely nostalgic; she feels exiled, as if life away from water is unnatural for her. The final lines make that need plain: she longs for water near.
Exiled — Summary
Searching my heart for its true sorrow, This is the thing I find to be: That I am weary of words and people, Sick of the city, wanting the sea; Wanting the sticky, salty sweetness Of the strong wind and shattered spray; Wanting the loud sound and the soft sound Of the big surf that breaks all day. Always before about my dooryard, Marking the reach of the winter sea, Rooted in sand and dragging drift-wood, Straggled the purple wild sweet-pea; Always I climbed the wave at morning, Shook the sand from my shoes at night, That now am caught beneath great buildings, Stricken with noise, confused with light. If I could hear the green piles groaning Under the windy wooden piers, See once again the bobbing barrels, And the black sticks that fence the weirs, If I could see the weedy mussels Crusting the wrecked and rotting hulls, Hear once again the hungry crying Overhead, of the wheeling gulls, Feel once again the shanty straining Under the turning of the tide, Fear once again the rising freshet, Dread the bell in the fog outside,-- I should be happy,--that was happy All day long on the coast of Maine! I have a need to hold and handle Shells and anchors and ships again! I should be happy, that am happy Never at all since I came here. I am too long away from water. I have a need of water near.