Thirteen words, and nearly every one of them carries more than it first seems to. The poem is about sleep, or something close to it: the sound of the sea lent to us as a way of finding calm. Its central idea is that stillness is not simply an absence of noise. It is something we are given by a larger music than our own, and we have to borrow it.
The title, «Composed», is the first clue to how the poem works. A piece of music is composed, and so is a person who has settled down after a restless day. The poem lets both meanings sit side by side. The music is "a great music", and the calm it produces is the state of being composed. Because the poem is itself a small, carefully built thing, it seems to perform what it describes, quieting the reader as it goes.
The verb "borrow" matters. We might expect "from the sea", but the poem says "borrow of the sea", a slightly old-fashioned turn of phrase that gives the line a hushed, almost liturgical tone. Borrowing also implies something owed. We do not own this music, and it will be taken back, the way waves keep drawing away from the shore. The sea becomes a patient lender, and the "we" makes the arrangement communal. This is not one sleeper's private comfort but a shared human habit of reaching beyond ourselves for peace. Even the word "great" works quietly here. It is a plain word, but it suggests something vast and impersonal, a music so big that a bed can only receive a little of it.
The real pivot comes in the last two lines, where the line break does the work. "And so still" first reads as a description: so quiet, so motionless. Then "the bed" arrives, and "still" turns into a verb. The music, it seems, stills the bed. The sentence changes meaning as we read it, much as a thought slips away at the edge of sleep. The poem never settles the question, and that openness is part of its charm. "Bed" is ambiguous too. Judging by the imagery, it could be the bed we sleep in, but a bed is also the floor of the sea, the ground under all that moving water. Read that way, the sleeper and the seabed become one image. Above is the surface and its great music, and below, in the human bed as in the sea's, is a deep and settled quiet.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme. "Sea" and "bed" are pointedly unmatched, which keeps the poem from the neat click of a closed couplet. Instead it relies on soft, repeated sibilants: "music", "sea", "so", "still". Said aloud, they make the hush of water running over sand. The rhythm is just as carefully handled. The lines shrink from four syllables to six, then three, then two, so the poem swells with its long second line and then recedes, like a wave pulling back. The dash after "sea" acts as a held breath, a pause before the closing. Both final lines end on weight: "still" and "bed" are short, solid syllables, and the poem comes to rest on them the way a head comes to rest on a pillow.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It contains a paradox, music used to produce silence, and it never explains it. It has no "I" and no argument, only an offer and a result: we borrow, and so the bed is still. It also teaches a useful lesson about reading short poems. A line break can change a word's grammar, a title can reshape the lines beneath it, and a plain word like "bed" can hold two worlds, one domestic and one oceanic. The poem asks us to slow down to its own pace, and by the end that is exactly what has happened.