Fourteen syllables, three lines, not a single verb: Dave Bonta's "Seaside" is hardly more than a glance, and that is its point. It gives us a time of year (May), a time of day (morning), a body of water at its fullest (the high tide), and a person who has shrunk to one organ of sight. The poem is about solitude, but not the heavy, mournful kind. Being "alone with the high tide" sounds closer to keeping company than to being abandoned, and the poem leaves us to decide how the speaker feels about it.
Look first at how the lines are built. They run three syllables, then six, then five, so the poem recalls the haiku without obeying the familiar 5-7-5 pattern. It borrows the haiku's brevity, its season word ("May") and its habit of setting down an image without explaining it. But the middle line is longer than a strict haiku would allow, and that looseness suits a poem about standing in front of something large and unmeasured. There is no end rhyme, yet the poem is held together by sound. The long *i* runs through the second and third lines like a ripple: "high," "tide," "my," "eye." The opening "May" and the later "my" are near-echoes as well, so the speaker's possessiveness is quietly planted in the first words. The soft *m* and *n* sounds of "morning" and "alone" give the start a hushed, unhurried feel, before the long vowels open out at the end.
The absence of verbs matters. Nothing happens in the poem. The tide doesn't rise, the speaker doesn't walk or look. We get a stack of noun phrases, like items on a shelf, and the effect is of stillness at a moment of fullness. A high tide is the sea at its peak, which hints that the moment can't last. The poem doesn't say so, but the phrase carries that sense of a threshold.
The word that gives the poem its flavour is "bachelor." It is faintly old-fashioned and a little comic, the sort of word that suggests a man of habit with his own routines. It also tells us something the poem never states outright: the speaker is unattached. Set beside "May," the traditional season of spring and renewal, and beside a tide that is full to the brim, "bachelor" makes a quiet contrast. The world seems to be at its most abundant, and the speaker is one unpaired person at the edge of it. Judging by the tone, though, the contrast looks wry rather than self-pitying. "Alone with" is a warmer phrase than "lonely for," and it treats the tide almost as a companion, or a date.
Then there is the pun that the whole last line turns on. "Eye" sounds exactly like "I," and the poem never uses the word "I." The speaker appears only through the possessive "my" and through the eye, so the self is reduced to its function of looking. A "bachelor eye" is an eye with no partner, taking in the morning without anyone to share what it sees. It may also be an eye that is free, since nobody is competing for its attention and the tide gets all of it. The poem holds both readings at once. The syntax adds a small ambiguity too. Because there is no verb to tie the phrases together, "alone with the high tide" could describe the morning, the speaker, or the eye itself, and the three seem to merge into one scene.
The title, "Seaside," is the only thing that tells us where we are. The poem never names the sea, a beach or a shore, so the setting reaches us through the tide and the title together. That economy is part of what makes the poem worth reading. In so few words it manages an image, a mood, a pun and a joke at the speaker's own expense, with room left for the reader to decide whether the morning feels peaceful, empty or both. A poem this short can't explain itself, so the reader has to stand at the water's edge and fill in the rest.