From the moment a woman appears on deck, the poem is built around a gap between what can be seen and what can only be imagined. Her “shy look” is not interpreted but inhaled; the sailors fill her reserve with a whole sensory world, breathing in “the perfume of swamp roots / And certain dark streets of Marseilles.” That detail is at once earthy and distant, as if her silence carries an entire geography. The opening makes her less a character than a surface for longing.
The poem’s movement is dreamlike because it refuses to settle. The woman “stands still in a shadow,” but around her the text drifts into fragments: “Voices of children rising from the sea, / Air bells and flowers. . . .” These images have no clear owner. They may be the sailors’ guesses or her own remembering. The ellipsis lets them hang, unfinished. Then the repeated phrase “Or maybe” introduces two more possibilities—a Paris street where “lovers twitter like canaries,” and a forest where “the leaves are hushed and still.” Each image is a small world, but none is confirmed; the poem prefers possibility to fact. The syntax itself enacts the act of watching someone and inventing an inner life for her.
The construction is loose but carefully weighted. It moves in short, mostly end-stopped lines of three or four stresses; there is no regular rhyme, yet quiet sound links appear in “still,” “shadow,” “forest,” and “hushed.” The word “still” appears twice, tying the woman’s body to the forest’s leaves. The enjambment after “the sailors / Inhale” makes the reader pause exactly where the sailors pause before taking in her presence. Later, “the sailors / Think of while she stands” places action and speculation on either side of a line break, just as the woman stands between the sea and the imagined forest.
The title names the central opposition. The sea is the present voyage, the deck, the voices rising from water; the forest is an interior, ancient space, silent and rooted. The woman rests one hand “lightly” on the rail, touching the ship without fully belonging to it. That hand on the rail is one of the only solid physical details, and it keeps the poem from floating away into pure fantasy.
The final couplet shifts into first person without being assigned: “Farewell, my old pine forest! / I might have lived there for a thousand years.” It may break through as the woman’s actual voice, or it may be another projection placed in her mouth. That uncertainty is central. The poem does not reveal a hidden truth; it dramatizes how a human figure can hold dozens of possible lives. The pine forest, with its thousand-year age, opposes the brief crossing of the sea. To say farewell to it is to mourn a self that might have stayed. The woman remains known only through the sailors’ tender, hungry seeing—and through one line of farewell that may or may not belong to her. The significance lies in that refusal to explain, allowing the poem to preserve the mystery it began with.