Twelve words, four lines, no full stop: Dave Bonta's poem can be read in a breath, yet it leaves the feeling of having gone a long way down. Much of that depth comes from the title, which is borrowed. "Full fathom five" opens Ariel's song in Shakespeare's *The Tempest*, where a drowned man lies on the sea floor, his bones turned to coral and his eyes to pearls. The song insists that nothing of him fades. He undergoes a "sea-change / Into something rich and strange." Bonta keeps the setting and the drowned, then quietly removes the comfort.
What remains is a single errand. The speaker went into the sea "only to talk to the dead." The poem is about grief, or more precisely about what a mourner does when no beautiful transformation is on offer: he goes to the dead himself and speaks to them. Its central idea is that grief is not tidy. It is "loving" and "raging" at once, and the sea is big enough to hold both.
The construction does a great deal with very little. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, but the lines shrink: five syllables, then seven, then two, then two. On the page the poem narrows as it falls, like a body sinking out of the light. The last two lines are the only ones that echo each other. "Loving" and "raging" are both two-syllable words, both stressed on the first syllable, both ending in *-ing*. They chime grammatically if not in vowel sound, which makes the emotions seem like twins rather than opposites. Nothing joins them, not even a comma or an "and." The line break sets them side by side and leaves them unreconciled.
The word choices are plain but not accidental. "Entered" is the verb you would use for a room, a house or a church, so the sea becomes a place with an inside where the dead might be found, not something to swim across. Whether the speaker literally wades in or the sea is a figure for being immersed in grief, the text doesn't say, and both readings stay open. "Only" makes the errand sound single-minded, perhaps slightly defensive, as if someone had asked what he was doing out there. "Talk" is the most ordinary verb available. It isn't "pray" or "mourn" or "address," and the repeated *t* in "to talk to the dead" has a soft tapping quality, like the start of a conversation. Yet the poem records only one side of it. The dead never answer, and the past tense ("entered") tells us the trip is over without telling us what came of it.
The final two words are participles with no subject attached, and that grammatical looseness is the poem's most interesting move. Who is loving and raging? The speaker, presumably, but the dead could be, and so could the sea. Moving between calm and storm, the sea is a natural image for such a mixture, though the poem never says so. Because the participles never close with a verb or a full stop, the feeling goes on past the end of the text. The poem also ends on the harsher word. Ariel's song ends in something "rich and strange," and Bonta's ends in rage.
That is where the poem's significance lies. It answers one of the most consoling passages in English literature without arguing with it, simply by withholding the coral and pearls. The title carries the whole inherited tradition of the sea as a gentle transformer of loss, and the four lines then put an unadorned human motive in its place. For a student reader, it shows how much a title can do, how a line break can stand in for a conjunction, and how an open ending can say more than a resolved one. It also gives grief permission to be angry, even while it is tender. The poem doesn't claim the dead can hear, or that the rage will pass. It says only that someone went down to them, carrying both feelings.