Few poems state their wish as plainly as «I Have a Need of Gulls». Daniel Whitehead Hicky opens with a confession of longing and then spends sixteen lines turning that longing into pictures: a speaker worn down by city life who craves the sea, the birds, and the quiet they seem to offer. The central idea is simple but felt: modern, crowded living leaves a person starved of something that only open, wild places can supply. What makes the poem more than a holiday postcard is that the speaker doesn't just want a rest. He wants answers.
The repeated phrase "I have a need" carries much of the poem's force. It appears at the start and returns three more times, each time attached to something different: gulls, the music of sea oats, freedom, a place to lie on the sand. The word "need" is stronger than "want" or "wish." It suggests hunger, something close to physical necessity, and the repetition gives the poem the rhythm of a plea. The effect is cumulative, like a person listing everything missing from their life.
Hicky builds his sea out of striking comparisons. The sunrise "drifts like a fleet of ships afire," a startling image that turns dawn light on water into a burning armada, silent and slow. The dark, by contrast, is "like eternity," a phrase that gives the night an almost spiritual vastness. Then the scale shrinks sharply: a shell "as pale as the sigh / In a sandpiper's throat" holds "a single salty note" curled in its palm. The poem moves between the enormous (eternity, burning fleets) and the tiny (one note, one sigh), and both belong to the sea. The personification of the shell, with its "palm," and of the sandpiper, with its sighing throat, makes the shore feel gentle and alive.
Colour is tightly controlled. White dominates: "foam-white acres," a "shell as pale," the "cool white peace of a cloud," and finally the "white answers" written in the sky. Even the gulls themselves are named "seagulls" only in the last stanza, when their cries are heard. This accumulating whiteness stands in quiet opposition to the unspoken grey of the city, and it gradually becomes a moral colour, standing for peace, cleanness, and clarity.
Structurally, the poem is a poem of two halves. The first stanza is outward-looking, describing the sea scene the speaker misses. The second turns inward and explains why: "Too long the city has housed me and fed me its fare, / Too long I have run with the crowd." The doubled "Too long" echoes the earlier "I have a need," so complaint and desire are made to mirror each other. The verbs of the city are passive or hurried (housed, fed, run), while those of the shore are restful and active by choice: "to bathe," "to lie," "to unshoulder." That last verb is especially good. Burdens become a physical load to be shrugged off, and the sands become the place where that can finally happen.
The rhyme is irregular rather than strict, which suits the poem's mood. Some lines chime clearly, such as "sea" and "eternity," or "note" and "throat," while others, like "ships afire" and "fare," drift free. The long, flowing lines, many of them stretching beyond a regular beat, feel like breathing in and out, or like waves rolling in unevenly. A tidier form would have felt too managed for a poem about escaping management.
The ending gives the poem its depth. The speaker admits he has "heart's dark questions unanswered," and instead of expecting spoken replies, he imagines the gulls writing "white answers" in the sky. It's a lovely reversal: the answers are not words but flight paths, visible and wordless, and they arrive as something to be read in light rather than argued out in thought. The poem suggests that some problems are not solved by thinking harder but by stepping into a bigger scene, where the questions seem to shrink.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It gives voice to a feeling most people recognise, the ache for open space after too long among crowds, and it does so with clear images, steady repetition, and a final line that turns escape into a kind of understanding.