Seven short lines, a title replaced by three asterisks, and a signature in lowercase letters: the poem arrives with almost nothing around it, and that suits it. A speaker lies on cool sand at night, speaking to a "you" who once loved the ocean. The central idea is that the sea has become a way of keeping that person close. Its sound now does what the loved one's voice used to do, which is comfort.
The opening four lines build a quiet pattern. "You loved the ocean / The way it moved / The way it smelled / The way it sang." The repeated "The way it" works like waves arriving one after another, and the lines are short, unrhymed and almost unpunctuated, so they roll rather than march. The phrase "the way" also tells us something. The speaker remembers how the ocean was loved, not just that it was. Noticing that someone loves the movement and the smell of the sea takes close attention, and the poem treats that attention as a form of love. The list also moves through the senses and ends on sound, which prepares for everything that follows.
Line five is where the poem turns. After four brief lines, it suddenly runs long: "I lay on the cool sand now in the dark listening to it sing." Nothing in it slows the reader down, so the sentence seems to stretch out along the beach. The word "now" pulls us out of the past tense of "loved" and into the present, and "in the dark" removes sight. Only touch (the "cool sand") and hearing are left. The verb "sing" is also an echo. The ocean "sang" in line four, "sing" here, and in the last line the "you" "sang." The poem keeps passing one verb back and forth between the sea and the person, until the two are hard to separate. The speaker is also doing what the "you" once did, listening to the ocean sing. The judgment is an inference, but the poem seems to suggest it.
Line six is the only one built as a formal list: "The waves are the melody, the birds are the chorus, and the wind is the harmony." It gives the night a full band, using musical terms that make nature sound like a choir. Each part has a job. The waves carry the tune, the birds answer it, and the wind sits underneath and supports. It is the longest line and the poem's fullest moment, a brief swell of sound before the ending. There is a small oddity too. The speaker is in the dark and still hears birds. That might reflect what the night really holds, or it might mean the speaker is hearing the whole scene as it was remembered. The poem leaves that open.
The last line changes the poem's direction: "Remember on sad nights you sang us to sleep." "Remember" is a command, spoken to the "you" as if they could still hear it. The little word "us" widens the poem as well. The speaker was one of the people being sung to, and perhaps not the only one. The line has no full stop, so the poem ends the way a wave pulls back, without closing. The word "sad" is plain and undecorated, which makes it hit harder. We are never told where the "you" is now. The past tense of "loved" and the lonely "now in the dark" suggest an absence, but the poem does not say more, and it is stronger for not explaining.
What makes the poem significant is how it handles loss without announcing it. It does not complain or describe its grief. It lets a lullaby move from a person to a place. The ocean becomes a replacement voice, and it also becomes a way for the speaker to stay close to someone by loving what they loved. For a reader, the lesson is how much a few small choices can do: one repeated phrase, a shift from "loved" to "now," a verb that keeps returning. With so few words, they carry a good deal of feeling.