Most sunrise poems end in praise. McKillen's spends three stanzas on praise and then, in a sudden three-line plea, asks to be taken away from the very scene it has just admired. The central idea is that beauty alone cannot make a place feel like home. The sea is magnificent, but the heart wants a meadow.
The opening stanza sets the scene in calm iambic pentameter, whose even beat suits a long ocean swell. Night is a building whose "eastward doors" are "opened wide," so that the sea becomes a room being flooded with light. The stars, "scattered like a broken string of beads," are a quieter image. The word "broken" gives the fading night a faint sense of loss, even as everything is declared "beautiful." The stanza's rhymes are slightly loose, since "sea" is only echoed by "beads," and the last line bends its word order ("all the ocean floor inside") to land on its rhyme. It also claims more than the eye could see, since light reaching the seabed is more wish than observation.
The second stanza gives the poem its best conceit. The sun "gets up, a painter out of bed," and the domestic phrasing makes sunrise sound like a daily job, with the word "again" suggesting an artist who clocks in every morning. His work is to turn "black water into blue" and to tint the foam with "ruby fire." Even the foam gets a personality, since it is "frantic" and born from "two waves' temperaments," as if the sea were full of quarrelling moods. Then comes the stanza's final phrase, which is easy to skim past: the sun makes the sea "a thing for man's desire." Calling the sea a "thing" turns it into an object to be wanted. That quietly sets up the ending, where the speaker's real desire turns out to lie somewhere else.
In the third stanza the day "comes gently," a deliberate contrast with the earlier "floods." The clouds "light and burn," and the verbs make colour feel like heat. Then the poem lowers its gaze to a sailor "somewhere singing in the shrouds." The word "somewhere" keeps him small and distant, and his portrait is almost a postcard: bare chest, "arms tattooed," hat tilted at a jaunty angle. The sentence also holds back its verb for four lines and only reaches "Salutes" at the very end, and what he salutes the day with is "thoughts of home and bed." Two details stand out. His tattooed skin is another painted canvas, a human echo of the sun's art. And "bed" rhymes with the sun's "out of bed" from the previous stanza. The sun rises from his bed while the sailor longs for his, so the splendid morning has no more pull on him than a spare room.
The last three lines break the pattern. Every earlier stanza had six lines and a tidy rhyme scheme, but here the poem shrinks to a triplet on a single rhyme: "sea," "be," "free." That rhyme loops back to "sea" in the very first line, as though the poem cannot get off the water even while pleading to. The doubled "Oh" makes the lines sound like a prayer, and "blessed meadow" has a religious glow that the sunrise, for all its gold, never had. There is also a neat reversal. The sea is traditionally a symbol of freedom, yet here freedom means leaving it. The speaker is not clearly named, and the plea could be the sailor's unspoken thought or the poet's own voice taking over. Either reading works.
Some phrases, such as "instead" and "the heart of me," feel bent to fit the rhyme. Even so, the poem's design is persuasive. It builds a gorgeous picture so that its rejection will register, and it shows that admiring a landscape and belonging to it are different things. The poem's significance lies in that quiet swerve, in which the dawn is praised and then set aside for a meadow.