The title gives us a year in brackets, 1943, and the poem offers almost nothing else to anchor it. There is no named place, no speaker and no event. There is a sea, a plain and a handful of colours. The sea "rose slowly from the plain", which is the wrong way round, since seas lie in hollows and do not climb out of land. That reversal sets the tone. The poem treats a year as a vast natural happening, something that arrives the way weather or a birth does, and its central idea seems to be that people can only be carried by such a year, not resist it. "Everything that year stopped seeking / stopped struggling."
The sea is born before it is anything else. It crashes "into life swollen as an infant", and the next lines keep the body close: "Salt white over red sand passed / from bosom into hand." The phrase suggests nursing, or a baby being handed over, a gift moving from one person to another. When it returns at the very end, one word has changed: "passed from bosom into red." The hand has vanished and only the colour is left. Together with the "bleeding tide" just before it, this suggests, judging by the imagery, that the birth has turned into a wound. The tenderness of the opening is never cancelled, only stained.
Shadow works as a frame in the same way. In the first stanza the sea is "a thing of its own shadow / traced out of the ripple", as if it were sketched from its own darkness. In the last, a "breaking penumbra" threads through the "swelling furrows of the plain". Furrows are what a plough leaves, so the sea and the field blur into each other, and the plain from which the sea rose is also what it now covers. The word family of "swollen" and "swelling" links the beginning and end too, and it can mean pregnancy, flood or injury. The poem never picks one, and the pressure of all three is part of its unease.
The middle of the poem slows down. The two-line stanza about everything that "stopped seeking / stopped struggling" is the shortest in the poem, and the repeated "stopped" works like a held breath. Whether this is peace or defeat is left open, and the mention of "fate" tips it toward the second. Then comes "Things primal held in their primacy", where the language folds back on itself, a thing held in its own firstness. The fleet that follows is placed "auspiciously", a word from omens and signs, yet the ships are "strewn upon the floors", which sounds more like scattering than sailing. "Sounding" in "a strange / and distant sounding place" may suggest both noise and a sailor's measuring of depth, though that double meaning is my reading.
Formally, the poem keeps no rhyme and no regular metre. Its long lines roll forward on one breath, interrupted by full stops and dashes, and by slashes inside the lines ("plain / crashing", "seeking / stopped") that read like small hesitations in a swell. The stanza breaks matter more. The third stanza ends on "a strange" and the fourth picks up with "and distant sounding place", so the sentence is dragged across the gap like water over a sill. The last sentence, "Where the bleeding tide / fares a name", never settles into a plain main clause. The grammar bends in odd places, such as "fares a name" and a "fleet" that "bind[s]", and this suits a poem about "meanings unknown before". Sound does some of the binding that rhyme would do: the b's of "bosom", "bleeding" and "breaking", the s's of "sea-ships auspiciously set strewn".
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to explain itself. A reader who knows 1943 as a year of war may hear it in "bleeding" and "fleet", but that is an inference the title invites and the text never confirms. What the poem actually does is give a year the shape of a myth: a birth, a surrender, a return to origins, and a tide that turns red. It leaves us with a landscape that is both field and sea, and no one in it who is still struggling.