Nobody in "Nocturne: Georgia Coast" is in any danger, and yet the poem hums with a low, pleasant unease. The shrimping boats are simply late. The sun has gone down faster than expected, and the speaker stands on shore watching for lights that haven't arrived. Out of that small, ordinary delay, Daniel Whitehead Hicky builds a poem about the way dusk dissolves the line between what we see and what we think we see.
The opening stanza sets the scene with a quiet personification. Dusk "has caught them cold," as if evening were a pursuer who has surprised the fleet, and darkness "gathers up the sun" the way someone might gather up laundry or loose coins. The sun's last light is "beckoning gold" that "guides them safely into port," a phrase that turns daylight into a kind of lighthouse, a service the sky performs for working people. When that gold is "lost beneath the tide," the loss feels practical as well as beautiful: the guide is gone. The stanza ends with two sky-bodies, a "lean moon" and Venus, "salty-eyed." That last phrase is the stanza's best touch. Venus is the evening star, but here she looks as though she has been crying, or has simply been breathing sea air all day. Salt belongs to the coast, to the tide, and to tears at once, so the image folds landscape and feeling together in two words.
The second stanza shifts from the sky to the men. The fishermen, we're told, will blame "dark's / Swift mischief or the stubborn sea." The line break after "dark's" is worth noticing: the possessive hangs at the end of the line, and the reader has to wait a beat for "mischief" to arrive, which mimics the very lateness the poem describes. Both explanations shrug off responsibility with a kind of seafaring good humour. The dark is a prankster, the sea merely stubborn, as though both were difficult neighbours rather than forces that could do harm. The tone stays gentle throughout.
Then comes the turn. The boats' lanterns appear as "sparks" that "ride shoreward at the foam's white rim," and the speaker admits a pleasing uncertainty: until the boats reach the pier, "I cannot say if their catch is shrimp, / Or fireflies burning clear." It is a lovely closing image, because the lanterns sit low on the water and flicker and drift, so they could be insects over a marsh as easily as lamps on a deck. The poem never settles the question. It lets the two possibilities glow side by side, the working world of nets and cargo and the small wild magic of summer evenings.
Formally, the poem is tidy but not rigid. Each stanza runs eight lines, and the rhymes are loose and partly slanted: "cold" and "gold," "port" and "tide" only half-chiming, "pier" and "clear" closing the poem with a clean, bright sound. The metre is a light, mostly iambic beat that rocks along like a boat at its mooring, with enough variation to keep it from sounding like a nursery rhyme. The title promises a "nocturne," a night piece, and the poem keeps that promise through its softness: lots of s and l sounds ("salty-eyed," "swift," "lean moon swings"), which give the language a lapping quality.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It would be easy to make a drama out of late boats; Hicky makes a mood instead. The final confusion between catch and fireflies suggests that evening is a time when ordinary things become strange and strange things seem ordinary, and the poem is content to stand at the edge of the water and let that happen.