Most poems about home look backward and sigh. "Call of a Sea Town" does something more unusual: it lets the town speak. The whole poem is an invitation, and the voice issuing it is the place itself. "Come!" it says in the opening word, and the imperative returns twice more in the poem. The speaker is "my streets," "my" nets and bay, and the addressee is a grown person who has gone away and is being coaxed, as the first line puts it, to come "like a child."
That phrase sets the poem's central idea: a place that shaped you never stops claiming you. The town does not argue or plead with grand reasons. It simply lays out its attractions, one sense at a time. There is the visual picture of lanterns hanging above fishing nets, then the smell of "tar, and fish, and seaweed," and then sound, in the "boatman's gossip" and the booming of surf. By the end, the invitation has become a whole body's memory of belonging.
The imagery works by turning ordinary harbour things into something slightly strange. "Along the darkening canyon / of my streets" is a striking choice: narrow lanes between tall buildings become a canyon, which makes the town feel vast and a little mysterious, the way streets feel to a small child after dusk. Then comes the lovely, odd verb in "boats barnacle the bay." Barnacles are things that cling, and by making the word a verb, the poet suggests boats crowding the water, stuck fast to it, as if the harbour were the boats' permanent skin. The idea of clinging quietly mirrors the poem's real subject, which is how childhood memories cling to a person.
Sound matters enormously here. The second stanza is built around soft hissing consonants: "sibilant with salt spray splash." The poem even names the effect it is performing, since "sibilant" is itself a sibilant word. The speaker's memory "booms in / over the rocks" like a wave, which is a clever reversal: usually we go to the sea, but here the past arrives with the force of surf. The line break after "booms in" lets the verb land with a thud before the sentence rolls on over the rocks.
The poem's most memorable image comes at the end: a star that "pops out / like a lighthouse-keeper / just remembering glow / for journeyings / home." The comparison is gently comic. The star appears suddenly ("pops out"), and the lighthouse-keeper has apparently forgotten his job for a moment, then remembered. That human forgetfulness is endearing, and it quietly says something about the town too: it is not a polished, perfect postcard but a lived-in, slightly absent-minded place. Yet the purpose is serious. The light exists for "journeyings / home," and the plural "journeyings" hints that the traveller has made many trips and wanderings, all of which could end here.
Structurally the poem is free verse, with no rhyme scheme and no regular metre. Lines vary in length, and the ellipses scattered through it ("streets . . . where," "bedtime . . .") act like pauses for breath, or like a voice trailing off into memory. The poem also ends on an ellipsis after "home," leaving the invitation open. It never says whether the traveller comes. That restraint is part of its charm; the town calls, and the silence afterward belongs to the reader.
What makes the poem worth reading is its quiet reversal of perspective and its precision about sensory memory. The line about children storing "the landwash smells" "forever" proves how true the poem is: smell is among the strongest triggers of memory, and the poet understands that a place lodges in us through tar and salt as much as through anything we consciously decide to remember. In a handful of short stanzas, the poem gives a town a voice, makes a lighthouse-keeper out of a star, and reminds us that home is less an address than a set of sounds and smells waiting for us to return.