Most poems about fishing follow the men out to sea. Daniel Whitehead Hicky's "Island Fishermen: St. Simon's" does something quieter and more unusual: it waits until the work is over and then watches what the day leaves behind. The poem moves in two halves. First comes the human exit, as the fishermen head home in a noisy crowd. Then comes the emptiness that follows, as the boats and the shoreline are left alone with the night. Its central idea is that the sea's workers and the sea's tools share a kind of life, and that evening reveals how much of that life depends on company.
The opening sets the scene with a pleasing, slightly odd phrase: "ripening of the tide." Tides don't ripen like fruit, but the word suggests fullness and readiness, and it makes sunset feel like a harvest of its own. Already the day's work has become "a thing for memory," as if the catch were being filed away the moment it is landed. The men themselves are described through a striking comparison: "bronze as nets the sun has dried." The simile is economical. It tells us their skin is weathered and golden, but it also folds the men into their equipment, so that people and nets seem made of the same sun-cured material.
The line that most rewards a second look is "Turn to a smaller doorway than the sea." Here the poem shrinks the scale of things in one move. The sea is imagined as a vast, open door, and the fishermen exchange it for the narrow doorways of the town. That is a gentle way of saying they are going home, but it also hints at how much smaller ordinary life can feel beside the ocean. The men don't seem sorry, though. They take "the dim streets in a motley crowd," and their "salty words and laughter" rise higher as they go, so loud that they leave "the gulls behind them in a cloud." Even the speech is seasoned by the sea.
Then the poem turns on the word "arguing." The boats are "rocking, arguing with the pier," and for a moment they sound like the fishermen themselves, grumbling and jostling in the water. It is the last bit of noise in the poem, and it is a clever bridge. The boats borrow the men's rowdiness just as the men leave it behind. By the next lines the argument has died away, and the boats are "deserted and forgotten," growing "lonely like old fishermen." The comparison works in two directions. The boats become people, and the people, imagined as old and idle, become a little like abandoned boats. Neither can do much without the other.
The sound of the poem supports this change of mood. It is a sonnet in shape, fourteen lines, and its rhyme scheme largely follows the Shakespearean pattern of alternating rhymes, so "tide" pairs with "dried," and "memory" with "sea." The final two lines, "roar" and "shore," close as a couplet, which gives the ending a settled, almost lulling finality. The rhythm is mostly steady iambic pentameter, which suits the slow ebb of evening, though it loosens in places, as when the crowd's talk spills upward. Some rhymes are slightly slanted, such as "cigarette" with "night" and "plain" with "fishermen," and that looseness keeps the poem from sounding too tidy.
The last image is the best. With no voice and "no flare of cigarette" to break it, the darkness is "settling warm and plain," and the only sounds left are a distant wave and "a pale wind breathing silver to the shore." Wind is given breath, and the night is given color, silver against warm dark. After all the human noise, the poem ends in pure atmosphere.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It could have praised the fishermen's heroism or lamented their hard lives. Instead it stays with a small, true moment, the hour after work, and finds in it a surprising tenderness for the boats themselves.