Prospero, in Shakespeare's *The Tempest*, is the magician who raises a storm at sea and keeps spirits bound to his orders. Dave Bonta borrows the name for a speaker who claims almost no power at all. "My only work is to look," he says, and the word "only" shrinks a life of command into a single modest task. The title sets up a contrast: the figure once associated with controlling the sea now sits beside it and pays attention.
The first stanza turns on one small piece of wordplay. "To look" is simply to watch. But the line break gives us "to look after," and the meaning shifts from seeing to caring, as we look after a child or a garden. The third line then delivers a surprise: "the tide." You cannot look after a tide. It comes and goes without help, and no one can protect or tend it. The phrase also holds a second sense, since to "look after" something can mean to follow it with your eyes as it moves away, and a tide is always leaving or arriving. The speaker's job is both impossible and a little comic, which is part of the poem's quiet charm. The work consists of being there.
The second stanza complicates the speaker's role. "Serving a sea I keep" reverses the old Prospero, who had servants. Now the speaker serves, and what he serves is the sea. The verb "keep" does a lot of work in a short space. It can mean to own, as with a shop or bees, or to guard, or to observe, as in "keep watch." The next line, "the noon till night," lets it stretch to mean keeping time, spending the hours. The stanza then ends on a phrase that seems to contradict all this keeping: "I let be." The speaker guards the sea by leaving it alone. The grammar is deliberately loose, and "I let be" can attach to the sea, to the hours, or to both. Without punctuation to settle it, the reader has to let the sentence stay open, which is exactly what the speaker does with the water.
The poem's form supports this idea of gentle attention. Each stanza tapers. Counting syllables, the first runs roughly seven, four, then two ("the tide"), and the second six, four, then three ("I let be"). Each stanza narrows like a wave thinning out on sand. There is no end rhyme, but the sounds echo quietly. "Look" repeats in the first stanza, and the long *e* of "sea," "keep" and "be" gives the second stanza a drawn-out, easy sound. The long *i* sounds of "my," "tide," "I" and "night" tie the poem together without any chime. The lines are short and the words plain, mostly one syllable, so nothing sounds grand or magical. Even the lack of capitals and full stops matters, because no sentence ever closes and the poem ends mid-motion, like the tide.
This is what makes the poem worth reading. In eleven or so words per stanza, it turns a figure of mastery into one of stewardship. Prospero's old magic was about making the world obey. The speaker's new work is to accept that some things, such as the sea, the passing of afternoon into night, and the pull of the water, are not ours to run. One reading, judging by the language of service and keeping, is that attention itself becomes a form of devotion. The poem does not say whether this is a loss of power or a freedom, and it leaves that tension in place.
The poem also shows how much a short text can hold. Two meanings of "look after," three of "keep," and a final phrase that undoes the speaker's own authority all fit into a few lines. A reader who slows down, as the speaker does, finds there is more to see.