Money and the sea make an odd pair, and the poem's first move is to put them side by side without explanation. "In several places, the sea— / like money, the copy / of a copy." The sentence has no verb. It simply points, and the reader has to work out the likeness. Money is a copy in an obvious sense: a banknote stands in for value rather than being it, and each note is stamped out like the last. The sea is a copy in a stranger way. It turns up "in several places" under different names and coastlines, yet it is the same water, and its waves repeat one another, each a copy of a copy. Read like this, the opening describes a world of endless, slightly empty duplication.
Then comes the pivot: "But." Everything after it rests on one phrase, "having / no mind to break." The word "break" is at work in several senses at once. Waves break, which is the most literal reading. A mind can break, as in a breakdown. Money, too, can be broken: we break a note to get change. The sea is the one thing in the poem that refuses all of this. The title, "Unbroken," gathers these meanings, and it also suggests a surface without a ripple, or a horse that has not been tamed. The poem's quiet claim is that the sea stays whole because it has no mind to be split by.
That claim is the central idea, and it is a little unsettling. Calm is usually praised as a human achievement, something we work toward. Here calm belongs to a thing that does not think at all. Peace comes from being incapable of the stress that breaks us, not from mastering it. The poem's tone is gentle, but its logic is a bit bleak: the unbroken state may belong only to what cannot be wounded because it cannot know.
The last three lines turn on another double meaning. "Resort" can mean a holiday place, and it can also mean the thing you fall back on, as in "a last resort." The sea is "the best resort of water," a place water goes to rest and also its natural refuge. The word fits the poem's money theme too, since resorts are things we pay for. It also lets the poem treat water as if it had a mood, a holiday, a preference, while saying in the same breath that the sea has no mind. The personification is a joke the poem is aware of.
The construction is spare. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only six short lines of free verse. The line breaks do much of the work. "The copy" ends a line and "of a copy" begins the next, so the repetition sits in two places at once, as if the poem were copying itself. "But having" hangs at the end of a line, and the reader has to wait for what is missing, "no mind to break." The pace changes as the poem goes on. The opening is choppy and broken up by a dash and commas. The ending runs smoothly, and the final line, "on a fine still night," is made almost entirely of heavy, slow syllables. "Fine still night" is hard to rush. Even the sounds seem to settle, with the long *i* of "mind," "fine" and "night" linking the idea of the mind to the calm of the scene.
"Fine" is worth a second look. It means pleasant weather, but it is also a word from the vocabulary of money, as in a fine, or fine silver. The poem may not intend this, but the pun suits a text that begins with currency. Either way, the poem ends with no commentary, only a picture of still water at night, as though the argument had dissolved into the thing it described.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so few words. It gives a whole idea about minds, value and calm in six lines, and it does so through ordinary words that keep turning out to mean more than one thing. It does not tell the reader what to feel about the sea. It sets a puzzle, resolves it with a single word, "break," and leaves the water quiet.