Walking along an empty beach at dawn sounds like the most relaxing thing in the world, and D. L. Emblen's "Scene" begins in exactly that mood. But the poem has a sting in its final lines. What starts as a quiet description of a perfect morning turns into a portrait of a man who cannot feel at home in perfection, because he is too full of everything the beach lacks.
The opening is all about newness. "The first of the morning" is a slightly unusual phrase, as if the day were a limited supply and we were getting the very first portion. Emblen then gives the sea a human weariness: it has been sighing and "sweeping" all night, like a cleaner or a housekeeper at work while everyone sleeps. By dawn the job is done, and the beach is called "a virgin place." The word suggests something untouched, but it also carries a faint note of pressure. Anyone who steps onto such a surface is a trespasser, and the poem plays on that by shifting into the second person: "you walk slowly, / knowing that your's is the only trail of footmarks." The reader is placed on the sand. The slow walking feels like politeness, or even reverence, as though hurrying would be rude. (The apostrophe in "your's" is a slip by modern standards, though it doesn't disturb the sense.)
The shape of the poem mirrors its subject. There is no rhyme and no fixed metre, so the lines are free to stretch and shrink like the shoreline. The long line about the "shallow, shining slope" spreads across the page the way the beach spreads, and the soft, sliding sounds in "shallow" and "shining" suggest wet sand catching the light. Then the poem widens its view: "North and south the unmarked sand turns slowly with the curve of the continent." The line is wonderfully large. A single beach becomes the edge of a whole landmass, and "slowly" appears again, now describing the curve of the earth itself. The pace of the walker and the pace of the planet briefly agree.
Emblen's whiteness is almost too much. The sand is "dazzling the eyes" and then "confounding the eyes," and the repetition shows delight sliding into bewilderment. The phrase "a miracle of cleanliness" is the poem's peak. Cleanliness is an everyday, domestic word, and calling it a miracle gives it a strangely religious weight. Nature's tidiness is more than neat; it is awe-inspiring, and perhaps a little unsettling.
The turn comes with "baffling the little man on the beach." Up to this point the speaker was "you," close and personal. Now the walker is seen from outside, shrunk to "the little man," and the change in distance makes him look small beside the scale of the continent. He is baffled, the poem says, because "he has carried with him all his life / the incredible litter of cities, roads, rooms and unwashed places." The list is carefully built. It moves from large public things (cities, roads) to private ones (rooms) and ends on "unwashed places," the vaguest and most uncomfortable item. The poem does not specify what these places are, so the reader supplies their own. The word "litter" is the sharpest choice, since it turns memory, habit, and experience into rubbish clinging to the person. "Carried" matters too: the mess is not left behind in the city but hauled along like luggage. Even here, on the cleanest ground imaginable, he leaves a trail, which quietly links back to the footmarks in line five.
The poem's lasting interest lies in this reversal. We expect nature to be the thing that overwhelms and humbles us with its size or violence. Here it humbles through purity. The beach does nothing; it simply is clean, and that is enough to make a human being feel contaminated. Emblen never lectures about pollution or modern life. He lets one image of a pristine shore expose, by contrast, how much clutter a person carries inside and out, and he leaves the little man standing there, dazzled and ashamed, with nowhere to put it down.