Laura's poem begins with a pronoun and no explanation: "It is hungry." We are well into the first stanza before we learn that "it" is the sea, "a convulsing body of water" that the one-word line insists is "Alive." The delay works. For a moment the threat could be an animal, a person or a fear, and only gradually does it become a predator with an "open and ravenous" mouth, "Calling for me." The poem follows a speaker being pulled into the water and drowning. Its central idea is that this terrifying surrender is also strangely beautiful, and that it finally turns into a kind of reunion with someone loved.
The form suits that movement. There is no rhyme and almost no punctuation, so the poem relies on short lines and line breaks to control the pace. "A breath from heaven / Which is gone / Before I can gasp" shows this well. The sky disappears in the white space between the lines, and the reader is left gasping just as the speaker is. The three stanzas also tighten as they go. The first is a storm seen from the shore, the second a glimpse of sky snatched away, and the third a descent in which the sentences shrink to blunt phrases: "My breath is frozen / Inside my lungs."
The poem's imagery is physical. In the first stanza the weather attacks through touch: "Coarse sand whips my bare skin," the wind "burns like fire," and the rain "Thrashes at my door." That last detail is odd and interesting. A door suggests a house, a place of safety, so the storm seems to be breaking in on ordinary life. Against all this violence, the "cragged rocks serenely survey." The soft sibilance of "serenely survey" slows the line down, and the rocks become indifferent spectators who watch and do nothing.
The most striking image comes in the second stanza, where the wave is "a water colour painting / Of ice blue and valley green." The speaker sees the wave as a work of art even as it takes her sky away. Yet the wave is also "solid" and "monstrous," and its "rabid mouth frothy with foam" is compared to "a lace doily." The comparison is deliberately uncomfortable. Rabid suggests disease and madness, while a doily is delicate, homely and a little old-fashioned. Putting them side by side makes the sea both beautiful and horrifying, and the speaker cannot separate the two. The mouth is worth following, too. It is the sea's mouth at the start and again in this stanza, and by the end the speaker's own mouth is "Coughing up ice." The one doing the swallowing has become the one swallowed.
That ice completes a shift in temperature. The wind burns like fire at the beginning, but by the last stanza everything is cold, with frozen breath and a body turning to ice. The final stanza also changes the setting from outside to inside. The speaker is swept "From the tight depths of reality," a phrase that sounds like a contradiction, since depths are usually wide and open. "Tight" suggests that ordinary reality feels cramped, so being carried out of it brings a dreadful release as well as a death. The "wretched scent of death" is there, but so are salt waves that become "a part of me" and are "Intoxicating." The words "depths of my soul" echo the title and the earlier "tight depths." Judging by this repetition, the sea outside may be mirroring something inside the speaker, such as grief or despair, though the poem never says so and can be read as a literal drowning too.
The ending is quiet and slightly unsettling. After all that noise, the speaker simply prays: "That you will not forget me / And if you do / It is because we are together." The logic is delicate. The fear of being forgotten is answered by the idea that forgetting could only happen if the two are no longer apart. It comforts, but it also hints, without stating it, that "you" may follow the speaker into the water, or has already gone there. The poem does not tell us who "you" is, and that gap lets readers fill in a lover, a friend or a lost family member.
What makes the poem worth reading is the way it holds opposites together. Fire and ice, beauty and rabies, terror and intoxication, loneliness and togetherness all sit in the same few lines. It would be easy to write a drowning as pure horror. Laura writes it as horror that slowly becomes tenderness, and that is why the last line stays in the mind.