The poem describes a wide, empty beach where a row of iron figures stand with their feet buried in the sand. The speaker begins with the stillness that strikes every visitor, then fills the scene with small, ordinary details: a child's scribbled "Poo!" in speech balloons, people walking dogs, tourists photographing the statues, tankers drifting past. The humour is gentle, but it sits beside something heavier.
The figures are "ageing monuments," scarred and pierced by pipes, longing, the speaker imagines, to reach faraway lands. Yet they only go "farther, deeper, / without moving," as the tide drowns them each day and returns them each morning. The final image of a "sea of time" swallowing them suggests that even monuments don't last.
The mood is quiet, patient and a little melancholy. The speaker seems moved by the figures' endurance, and also by their loneliness and the slow, certain way they are worn away.