A question with no question mark opens the poem: "Who're you she smiles up at me." Mc Enery drops the punctuation, so the child's words slide straight into the speaker's narration and the line comes out in one breath, the way a child might say it. We never learn who the speaker is, and the poem doesn't answer. We can only tell that a small girl is looking up at a taller person, smiling, while the two of them watch the water. Whether the question is a game or a real puzzle, her smile makes it feel friendly rather than uneasy.
The first stanza is built around waiting. The pair "scan the sea / Searching for spouts", and the hissing s-sounds (scan, sea, searching, spouts, signalling) mimic the hush of looking hard at a restless surface. The title uses the same alliteration, so the poem begins as it will go on, with the sound doing some of the work. The longest line, "Signalling the presence of Dolphins or whales", stretches out like a gaze moving along the horizon. Then the poem lets us down: "Unfortunately none appear." That flat, slightly formal "unfortunately" sounds like a grown-up's apology for a disappointing outing. The animals were supposed "to greet and cheer", and the rhyme of "appear" with "cheer" closes the stanza with a neat click, as if to say that this was the expected ending, and it has been denied.
The second stanza changes direction. We learn that the outing belongs to "A young ladies important date", which is probably a birthday, since the day is "for candles to be blown" and there are "Eight lights". The missing apostrophe in "ladies" is a small flaw, but it matches the unpunctuated looseness of the whole poem. The word "date" is a nice choice, because it makes the child sound like someone with an engagement in her diary, and it treats her day with the seriousness she probably gives it herself.
The poem's best idea is quiet. In stanza one, spouts are meant to be signals of a presence, and none come. In stanza two, the presence has been there all along. The girl does the greeting and the cheering that the dolphins and whales failed to do, and her smile takes the place of the spout on the horizon. The poem never says this outright. It lets the two stanzas sit side by side, and the reader notices that the real event was never at sea.
The imagery supports this shift. The vast, unreliable sea gives way to small, dependable things: candles, seeds, a face. "Seeds of joy sown" borrows from farming, so the day is pictured as something planted that may grow into a memory. The rhyme of "blown" and "sown" links the breath that puts out a candle with the scattering of seeds, as if the wish and the planting were one act. Fire sits quietly against water here too, since eight small flames take over from the sea's great scale. The final phrase, "Eight lights to glint / In a smiling face", is pleasantly ambiguous. The lights could be candle flames reflected in her features, or her own bright eyes, or both. Either way, the number eight is small beside an ocean, and the poem treats it as enough.
The ending is also worth noticing. Stanza one closes on a complete rhyme, but "face" at the end of the poem has no partner. After the earlier tidiness, the poem is left open on the image of the child, as though nothing needs to be added or resolved. The short lines and light rhymes (me/sea, appear/cheer, blown/sown) give the whole piece the feel of a simple verse that might be spoken aloud to a child, which suits its subject.
The poem is slight, and it knows it. Its significance lies in how it handles disappointment. An expected wonder fails to turn up, and the writer sees that something better is already in front of him. The poem suggests that we can spend a day searching the horizon and miss what is smiling beside us, and it rewards the speaker, and the reader, for finally looking down.