A ferry nosing out of fog is a ready-made image of arrival, and Mary F. C. Pratt uses it to ask a question that sounds almost casual: of all these people heading for shore, who will end the night in someone's arms? The poem seems to answer with the obvious candidates, a pair of young lovers on the deck. Then it quietly changes the answer. Its central idea is that desire and tenderness don't belong only to the young and good-looking. They survive in the plain, worn-down gestures of people who have stopped being looked at.
The opening three lines work like a slow clearing of the air: "Breaking out of deep sea fog / in moist full moonlight / buoys rocking bells". There is no punctuation, so the sentence drifts forward as the boat does. The missing verb for the bells makes us supply the sound ourselves, a faint clanging across water. The grammar is also pleasantly ambiguous, because the buoys can rock while the bells ring, or they can rock the bells as if they were cradling them. "Moist" is a surprisingly bodily word for weather, and it prepares the way for the question that follows. Then comes the first full stop, in "We're all coming ashore," and the poem shifts from scenery to people. The speaker counts herself or himself among the passengers for that one line. By the next, the speaker has become an observer: "these passengers," not "us."
The question, "Who of all these passengers / gets to make love tonight?", is bluntly phrased. "Gets to" makes lovemaking sound like a prize handed out unfairly. Its rhyme with "moonlight" three lines earlier is the poem's only real sound-echo, and it quietly ties the romantic setting to the wistful wondering. The poem then offers two couples, and the contrast is deliberate. The young pair are "lean" and "brown," with "smooth hair" that "blows together." The adjectives are all sleek, and the wind does half the work of joining them. The other pair are introduced with far less kindness: "A fat grey man and his shabby wife." The speaker's eye is a stranger's eye, quick to judge. The labels change too. The young ones are "lovers," while the older woman is a "wife," a word that sounds settled and domestic. The poem sets us up to assume that romance belongs to one couple and routine to the other.
Then it watches more closely and the judgment falls away. Their meal is potato chips in a snack bar, the least romantic setting imaginable, yet "their feet touch under the table," a contact too small to be performance. Then comes a small exchange of service and thanks: "When he brings her coffee she smiles, / with one rough finger strokes his hand." The last line is the most carefully built in the poem. Putting "with one rough finger" before the verb slows the sentence, so the gesture seems to unfold at the same pace as the touch. "Rough" hints at hands that have worked, and "strokes" is a gentle verb that contradicts that roughness. The poem never says outright that they will make love tonight. It simply makes the reader see that the question has been answered. Where the young couple's closeness is partly an accident of wind, the older couple's is chosen and repeated, the kind of habit that stays alive for years.
The form supports this plain-spoken mood. The poem is a single block of thirteen lines of free verse, with no regular metre and mostly short lines of a few stresses each. Most lines end on a pause, which keeps the voice level and observant, like someone quietly watching without wanting to be noticed. The diction is everyday ("snack bar," "coffee," "potato chips") and the details are physical rather than abstract. This is why the ending lands without sentimentality. There is no comment, no moral and no explanation, only a hand being stroked.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth reading. It would be easy to write a ferry poem about young love under a full moon, and the first half seems to promise one. By ending instead on an unglamorous couple, the poem turns its opening question around. The answer to "who gets to make love tonight?" is not decided by looks or youth. It belongs to anyone still willing to reach across a table.