The speaker and a partner are swept out by a rip tide on a day that looks perfectly peaceful. The poem follows the struggle in plain, urgent steps: they swim toward shore and only drift farther out, the partner loses his footing, and he panics and clings to the speaker's arm. The speaker then takes charge, steadying him, ordering him not to panic, and telling him to let the waves carry them in.
What stands out is how controlled the speaker stays. Fear shows up in flashes, like the picture of him "dying alone in the sea," but the voice is mostly practical. The short, unpunctuated lines make the scene feel breathless and fast. The ending shifts the mood. Safe on land, with a strange fog settling in, the speaker says the ordeal now has "no more reality" than a bad dream. The poem closes with relief, but also an eerie sense of how quickly danger can vanish and leave only memory.