Six short lines, and the poem has already changed speakers. It begins in the voice of a proverb, speaking of "every man," and ends in the voice of one stranded person saying "I." The whole poem lives in the gap between those two voices, between how arriving in a new place is imagined and how it can actually happen.
The opening sentence is calm to the point of swagger: "When a land is new / every man goes / as if at dinner." Dinner suggests comfort, routine, a seat already waiting, and also appetite. It is hard not to hear a hint that a new land is something to be consumed, though that is an inference rather than anything the poem says outright. "New" is also a matter of perspective, since a land is only new to the person arriving. The poem quietly takes the newcomer's point of view, and the newcomer is confident. The line break after "goes" adds a shadow. Read on its own, "every man goes" sounds like a statement about mortality, as if all men simply depart. Before "as if at dinner" arrives to smooth it over, the line holds a faint, darker meaning, and the casual tone is a little unsettled by it.
Then comes the shortest line in the poem, "Cast up," just two syllables. After the full stop it lands like a body on a beach. Grammatically it hangs from the "I" in the next line, so the speaker is the thing the sea has thrown ashore. The verbs mark the turn. Earlier, men "go," and they walk with purpose and take the land as they find it. Now the speaker is *cast*, a passive verb, with no say in the arrival. "Cast up" can also mean vomited out, so the sea becomes something that has rejected him. The poem never says this, but the phrase makes room for it.
The last two lines are the strangest and the richest: "I believe no sea / besides the ship's." The syntax is odd. We expect "I believe *in* no sea," but the poem uses "believe" the way we say "I believe no one," meaning "I trust nothing but." At the same time the word carries the sound of a creed, a statement of faith. The speaker's faith has shrunk to a single object, the sea as it was known from the ship. That is a sea with a deck above it, a heading, a table laid for dinner. One reading is that the castaway refuses to credit the vast, indifferent water that actually wrecked him and clings to the tamed version. Another is bitterly ironic, since the ship's sea is the very sea that threw him ashore, so his loyalty is to the thing that failed him. The poem allows both. It also quietly links the two halves. The easy, dinner-table confidence of the opening belongs to the ship's world, and the castaway is still carrying it.
The form is as spare as the situation. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, but the line lengths do some work. Counting syllables, the lines run five, four, five, two, five, four. The first three are balanced and even-tempered, the fourth collapses, and the last two recover but never regain the opening ease. Sound reinforces this. The final lines are full of hissing s-sounds, in "Cast," "sea," "besides" and "ship's," which makes the language faintly like surf. The long *ee* of "believe" and "sea" stretches the vowel out like a held breath. The poem ends on "ship's," a clipped, consonant-heavy word. The possessive hangs without its noun, because "sea" has been dropped. The phrase is itself washed up and incomplete, as though the ship, and the sea that belonged to it, have been lost.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It names no island, no wreck and no year, and it gives no history for the speaker. Nothing in the text pins it to one place or period, and that openness is its strength. A reader can hear in it the optimism of explorers, or of anyone who sets out with a plan and a place at the table, and then the stubborn, slightly absurd loyalty of someone whose plan has failed. By shifting from "every man" to "I," from "goes" to "cast up," and from confidence to a narrow, defensive belief, the poem shows in six lines how a person can hold on to the old frame of reference even after it has been wrecked.