A year is a long time to stare at one horizon, yet Dave Bonta's sailor says almost nothing about the sea. The poem gives him four short lines, and the ocean appears only in the three words "at sea." Everything else happens inside him. What he reports after a year away is a small, gnawing, unexplained ache: "the worm in my heart."
The title promises something grand. "The sailor's life" sounds like a phrase from an adventure story or a song, a whole existence summed up in a generalisation. The poem undercuts that promise. Instead of storms, ports or wide horizons, we get one private sensation and one odd comparison. The gap between the big title and the tiny poem is where much of the meaning sits. The sailor's life, it suggests, is not mainly made of what you see. It is made of what happens to you while you wait.
The worm is the most unsettling word in the poem. Worms belong to rot and burial, and "a worm in the heart" echoes the old picture of something eating a thing from within. It could be homesickness, regret, boredom or dread, and the poem refuses to say which. Because the feeling goes unnamed, it stays unsettling. A sailor might also have reason to think of boring creatures that eat into wood, though the poem never mentions them. That is only a possible overtone, but it fits the sense of something slowly working its way through a vessel.
Then comes the simile, which is the real surprise: the worm "is like a train through / a city I never heard of." Two things happen here. First, the image moves from sea to land. A sailor a year from shore reaches for a railway, as if his mind is already trying to get back to solid ground, to tracks, to something that runs on a fixed line. Second, the comparison quietly turns the speaker's heart into the city. The train passes through it, and the city is somewhere he has "never heard of." Read this way, the sailor feels like a stranger to his own interior. Something is travelling through him, and he can't even name the place it is travelling through.
The simile also works at the level of shape and movement. A worm is long and segmented, and so is a train. Both burrow or run through a space, and both can pass through without stopping. A train going through a city does not stay. It is a brief, indifferent crossing, and perhaps that is the point. The ache doesn't settle or explain itself. It just goes through him, and the city, like the heart, is left unchanged and unknowing.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, though the lines have a clear pattern. The first three each run to five syllables ("A year at sea, and," "the worm in my heart," "is like a train through"), and the last stretches to eight ("a city I never heard of"). The poem seems to gather speed and then lengthen, like a train pulling out of a station. The line breaks add to this. Lines one and three end on weak, unfinished words, "and" and "through," so the reader is tipped forward into the next line without a pause. The final line ends on the small word "of," which trails away instead of closing firmly. The poem stops without resolving, as the feeling does.
Sound plays a quiet part too. "Worm," "heart" and "heard" are near neighbours. "Worm" and "heard" share a vowel in most accents, while "heart" and "heard" share their opening and closing consonants. The effect is faint, but it ties the creature, the organ and the unknown city into one chain of sounds, as if the poem is making the three seem related.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It takes a familiar figure, the sailor, and strips away the romance, leaving a long stretch of time and a feeling too strange to label. Its central idea is that a long absence can make a person unfamiliar to himself, a country he has never visited. The poem doesn't explain this. It lets one train cross one unknown city, and the image stays in the mind after the words are gone.