A whole sailor's career is folded into four short lines, and the most unsettling thing about it is how calmly it is told. The title, "Old salt," gives us the speaker: the traditional name for a veteran seaman, someone weathered and cured by his trade. What he offers is less a memoir than a confession delivered with a shrug. He serves the sea, he is foolish for doing so, and he has led other people into trouble. The central idea seems to be that devotion to something as vast and indifferent as the sea is part worship and part folly, and that the people who follow such a devotion pay for it, sometimes with company they have dragged along.
The first line sounds like a proverb: "The seal is chaplain to the sea." It is nearly regular iambic tetrameter, four steady beats, and the repeated *s* sounds in "seal," "is" and "sea" make it hiss and wash like water. It also stages a clever pun. A seal is an animal, but "seal" is also what a chaplain might keep, as in the seal of confession. Judging by the imagery, the animal that lives in the sea becomes the keeper of its secrets, a pastor with a sleek head and no sermon. Chaplains are also the people who minister to sailors, so the metaphor gives the sea a congregation.
Then comes the swerve: "I am her fool." The line is only four syllables, and the abruptness feels like an admission. If the sea has a chaplain, it has a court, and the speaker has taken the other available office, the jester's. A fool can be a clown, a dupe or someone hopelessly in love, and the line allows all three. The pronoun "her" makes the sea a woman, an old habit among sailors, and it adds the sense of a devotion that is half romantic. Notice that this line and the first are in the present tense. The speaker is still the fool, and the arrangement is ongoing.
The poem then slips into the past tense, and the grammar becomes a kind of confession. "I took my crew to the devil" is blunt about responsibility. He doesn't say "we went." He *took* them, which makes him the captain and makes the blame his. The phrase "to the devil" is an everyday idiom for ruin, but in a poem about the sea it also calls up the old saying about being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. The poem never quotes that saying, yet it hovers behind the line. Here the devil is a destination as well as a threat.
The last line is the strangest: "and there we drank." It is entirely monosyllabic, and the casual "and" makes it sound like the next bit of a pub story. Hell becomes a tavern, and the damned simply order a round. But "the drink" is also a slang name for the sea, and a crew that goes down to the devil through water has perhaps gone down for good. So the line may mean carousing or drowning, and the poem never decides. The speaker's flat, unrepentant tone is what keeps both readings alive.
There is no end rhyme, but the poem is stitched together by quieter echoes: "fool" and "crew" share a long *oo*, and "chaplain" and "drank" share a short *a*. The line lengths also matter. The two short lines, 2 and 4, land like blows after the longer lines before them, and the vocabulary shifts from the ceremonial ("chaplain") to the plain and physical ("drank"). The poem moves from hymn to barroom in four lines.
What makes it worth reading is how much it leaves unsaid. We aren't told whether the speaker regrets what happened, whether the crew survived, or what the seal's silent ministry is worth. The chaplain is present, but there is no sign of absolution. In very few words the poem holds a joke, a confession and an epitaph at once, and the effect is of a tall tale told by someone who knows exactly what it cost.