An old sailor friend has vanished—gone for a decade with no word—and the speaker is left with only memory. Walking by the man’s cottage, he sees the garden fallen into ruin: roses gone, trellises like bones, swallows where life used to be. The mood is elegiac and hushed, heavy with time and absence. The speaker keeps asking where the friend lies now, whether in Indian waters, off Atlantis, or near Cape Horn, but no one remains who can answer. What makes the grief especially sharp is the lack of a grave or a definite story; the man is just “a name carved somewhere on the sea.” At the end, the speaker walks down toward the living town, its lamps and voices, while the friend stays below the ocean, silent under storms.
Pasa Thalassa Thalassa — Summary
Gone--faded out of the story, the sea-faring friend I remember? Gone for a decade, they say: never a word or a sign. Gone with his hard red face that only his laughter could wrinkle, Down where men go to be still, by the old way of the sea. Never again will he come, with rings in his ears like a pirate, Back to be living and seen, here with his roses and vines; Here where the tenants are shadows and echoes of years uneventful, Memory meets the event, told from afar by the sea. Smoke that floated and rolled in the twilight away from the chimney Floats and rolls no more. Wheeling and falling, instead, Down with a twittering flash go the smooth and inscrutable swallows, Down to the place made theirs by the cold work of the sea. Roses have had their day, and the dusk is on yarrow and wormwood-- Dusk that is over the grass, drenched with memorial dew; Trellises lie like bones in a ruin that once was a garden, Swallows have lingered and ceased, shadows and echoes are all. Where is he lying to-night, as I turn away down to the valley, Down where the lamps of men tell me the streets are alive? Where shall I ask, and of whom, in the town or on land or on water, News of a time and a place buried alike and with him? Few now remain who may care, nor may they be wiser for caring, Where or what manner the doom, whether by day or by night; Whether in Indian deeps or on flood-laden fields of Atlantis, Or by the roaring Horn, shrouded in silence he lies. Few now remain who return by the weed-weary path to his cottage, Drawn by the scene as it was--met by the chill and the change; Few are alive who report, and few are alive who remember, More of him now than a name carved somewhere on the sea. “Where is he lying?” I ask, and the lights in the valley are nearer; Down to the streets I go, down to the murmur of men. Down to the roar of the sea in a ship may be well for another-- Down where he lies to-night, silent, and under the storms.