Spence's "Farewell to the Shore" is a goodbye built almost entirely out of negatives. Eight lines, two stanzas, and the word "no" or "nor" appears five times. The speaker and his companions (the poem says "we") are leaving a seaside place for the hills, and rather than listing what they will gain, the poem inventories what they will no longer do: sleep on the sands, count stars, wait for news from the wind, listen for a night bird, watch a distant light. The central idea is that departure is felt most sharply as a list of small, lost habits. Leaving the shore is not one big grief but a series of quiet cancellations.
The only forward movement in the poem is crammed into a single line: "For now to the hills it is up and away." Everything else looks backward. That contrast gives the poem its tension. The hills are named once and briskly, almost as an obligation, while the sea gets all the tenderness. Even the verbs of the shore are slow and attentive: to "slumber," to "list" (an old word for listen), to "strain," to "gaze." These are the activities of people with time on their hands and something to wait for, and the poem suggests that the waiting itself was the pleasure.
The waiting is also oddly open-ended. The speakers "strain for such tidings as sea-winds convey," but we never learn what the tidings were. The poem makes no mention of a ship, a person, or a message. The same is true of the "flare of a far-light," which they gaze toward without saying what it signals. This vagueness is a strength. The poem is more interested in the posture of longing, the head cocked toward the dark, than in any particular thing longed for. Judging by the imagery, the shore was a place of anticipation, and what is being given up is the habit of expecting something from the horizon.
The sound of the poem pulls in the same direction. Each stanza rhymes ABAB: "slumber" with "number," "away" with "convey," "star-light" with "far-light," "dune" with "moon." The lines are long and rolling, with a lilting, galloping rhythm of two light syllables followed by a stress ("No MORE by the SANDS of the Ocean we'll SLUMber"). That swing is close to the movement of waves, so the poem sounds like the sea even as it says goodbye to it. The rhymes are also noticeably full and musical. "Dune" and "moon" belong together as sounds in the way sand and moonlight belong together as images.
The imagery is almost entirely of night and dimness, and it grows fainter as the poem proceeds. First comes the broad sweep of stars across the eastern sky, then the "pale of the star-light," then a "still dune," and finally the closing line, where the far-light is "afade in the dull of the dim of the moon." That last phrase is the most striking in the poem. It stacks "dull," "dim," and the clipped, archaic "afade" into a line that itself seems to fade, its soft d- sounds dulling the ear as the light dulls the eye. A poem about leaving ends by letting the scene dissolve rather than slam shut. The shore is not rejected; it is allowed to slip out of sight.
Notice, too, how much of the poem's world is sound and sense rather than action. The night bird is only a "cry," heard "from over still dune," never seen. The sea-winds carry "tidings." Even the stars are not looked at so much as counted and talked about. The farewell is to an atmosphere, to a way of paying attention, as much as to a place.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much feeling it gets from restraint. It never says "we are sad," and it never describes the hills. It simply keeps repeating "no more," "nor," "no longer," like someone walking away and glancing back again and again. The structure enacts the reluctance: the poem cannot quite stop saying goodbye, and each negation is another look over the shoulder.