A day at the beach sounds like the least literary subject imaginable, and D. L. Emblen seems to know it. "The Bathers" begins with an ordinary crowd arriving at the shore, and its quiet achievement is to make that crowd feel both comic and oddly moving. Over three short stanzas, the poem watches people approach the sea and slowly reveals what the approach shows about them: however different they look, they meet something vast with the same mixture of nerves and delight.
The opening simile sets the tone. The "landsmen" crowd the shore "like children at a carnival." The word itself is telling, because it defines these people by what they are not: they belong to land, and the sea is foreign territory. The verbs pile up in short, breathless fragments, "exclaiming, / pointing seaward, / shading their eyes with hands and books," so that the lines themselves seem to jostle and point. Even the detail of shading eyes with books is gently funny: they have come prepared for leisure, and the sea has interrupted it.
The most interesting idea in the first stanza comes with the deck chairs. The bathers "bring their various lives along, / as dangling and cumbersome as folding deck chairs in their arms." Lives and chairs share one clumsy comparison, and both are things carried awkwardly, always slightly in the way. The stanza closes on a neat balance: they are "as intimately varied as their costumes / and as basically the same." Here is the poem's central claim in miniature. Differences of age, clothing and biography are real, but they are surface. Beneath them, everyone is doing the same thing.
The second stanza sorts the crowd by age, almost like a field guide. The old ladies "peer nearsightedly / and poke the softer sand with canes", cautious and testing. The young are "brown and agile as seals," a comparison that already places them halfway into the water, while small children "disappear and reappear, / crying with sandy mouths." That last image is wonderfully specific. You can taste the grit. Emblen avoids grand description in favour of small physical facts, and the animal comparisons (seals, and later dogs) quietly suggest that the sea strips people back toward something more instinctive.
The final stanza is the poem's heart, and it belongs to the fathers. These are men who, one imagines, spend most of their lives as figures of competence, yet here they "shyly step across to the moving edge of surf, / and stand there, staring." The word "shyly" is a small surprise, and "they look naked and cold in their white skins" makes them vulnerable in a way ordinary life rarely allows. Their advance is a beautifully observed bit of physical comedy: "drawing back and hopping forward." The rhythm of that line does what the men do, retreating and lunging. Then comes the final simile, "as dogs meeting the sea for the first time", which echoes the carnival children of the opening. The poem has come full circle, from children to fathers behaving like children, and even like animals.
Formally, the poem is free verse. There is no rhyme scheme and no regular metre, and that suits the subject: the lines vary in length like waves, short fragments breaking against longer, more descriptive sentences. The looseness also keeps the tone observational rather than lyrical. The speaker stays on the sand, watching, never explaining or moralising.
What makes the poem worth reading is its gentleness. It would be easy to mock these people, and there is humour in every stanza, but the mockery never curdles. The comedy of the hopping fathers is also a kind of tenderness, because their hesitation is honest. The sea is large, cold and indifferent, and the poem suggests that everyone, whatever they carry, has to decide how to walk into it. By ending mid-motion, with the laughing men still advancing, Emblen leaves us with courage that looks ridiculous and is real anyway.