Steve J Waterfield's "A Sea of Troubles" starts on a cruise ship, the most carefree setting imaginable, and turns it into a moral trap. The speaker is a passenger who notices the smiles of the crew and wonders what lies behind them. His answer is that the staff "can't afford / to look depressed". Their jobs are "hanging by a thread," and one "false step" would see them "cast aside." The staff are performing cheerfulness as part of the work, finishing everything "before the tide," as though the sea itself sets their deadlines. Against that stands the speaker's own "life of luxury, / the sun the sea, a new port every day."
The poem's central idea is that good intentions cannot be trusted to produce good results. The speaker tries one remedy after another and finds a flaw in each. He could end the cruise, but the staff would be sent "back home to what?" He could tip, but tips merely "subsidise the ship," because "the more I give, the less the liner pays." The poem then widens. Donated clothes put local factories out of business, free food starves local farmers, and foreign aid "fuel[s] corruption" until "only the arms dealers get a share." A holiday pang of conscience grows into a view of the whole world's charity as self-defeating.
The title does a lot of quiet work. "A sea of troubles" is a phrase from Hamlet's famous soliloquy, where he asks whether to "take arms against" his troubles or to endure them. Here the phrase suits a poem set at sea, and it also casts the speaker as a paralysed, Hamlet-like figure who cannot decide how to act. The "arms dealers" in the penultimate stanza may be a deliberate echo of that line, though that is an inference rather than something the poem states.
The form is tidy. There are eight quatrains rhyming ABAB, followed by a closing couplet, a shape that loosely recalls the sonnet's final rhyming pair. The lines run in a fairly regular iambic pentameter, and that smooth, chatty rhythm gives the poem its tone, which is wry, conversational, almost like light verse. The effect is oddly uncomfortable, since the jaunty beat sits against grim subject matter, much as the crew's smiles sit against their anxiety. A few lines strain the metre ("In Africa and they're going for a song"), and the rhymes sometimes stretch, as with "starved" and "halved." Whether this is carelessness or the sound of an argument getting out of hand is for the reader to judge.
The poem's logic is carried by small connecting words. "So they just smile instead." "And so the local factories have to close." "And so the local farmers there are starved." The repeated "so" works like a row of falling dominoes and makes each disaster seem inevitable. Idioms help too. "Going for a song" suggests cheapness, and "you can't do right for doing wrong" turns the old complaint "damned if you do" into a neat, tired shrug. The speaker's candour also matters. "So then I ease my conscience with a tip" is an honest, self-mocking admission that his generosity is partly for his own comfort.
The ending is the most interesting choice. The closing couplet, "A tricky thing these days, this doing right; / to live life well and still sleep well at night," plays on two senses of "well," comfort and goodness, and asks whether the two can ever coexist. It offers no solution. The speaker finishes where he began, still on his sun lounger, still uneasy.
That refusal to resolve is both the poem's strength and its weak point. Its economic claims are sweeping, and readers may ask whether aid, tipping and recycling are really as pointless as the speaker says. But the poem is more convincing as a portrait of a mood than as an argument. It captures the guilty helplessness of a comfortable person who sees inequality close up and can find no clean way to act. It also leaves the reader with a question, which is whether feeling that helplessness is a reason to do nothing or a reason to look harder for a better answer.