Loe's poem imagines a night of physical intimacy as a voyage, with the lovers' joined bodies forming a single "corporal ship." The sea imagery runs throughout: a keel, a starboard hour, a shoreline, a sailor. The beloved's body becomes a landscape. Meadows roll from the brow, plains rise from the ear, and hair trails like an ancient coast in the morning light. The speaker casts himself as a sailor, "shipwrecked in the light," which suggests he is overwhelmed rather than harmed, lost in wonder at the other person.
The feeling is awe mixed with surrender. In the last stanza, the lovers leave behind the "cold geometry" of their separate bodies and become "without boundaries: ocean size." The mood moves from dark and charged at the start to bright and expansive at the end, as though night gives way to dawn. The language is dense and sometimes strange, so it helps to read it as a series of images rather than a plain story.