William Dickey's "Islands" is built around a single, repeated act of the mind: "I imagine." Three times the speaker begins a sentence this way, and each time he looks past the immediate world, past fog and "promiscuous water," toward a community where nothing is out of place. The poem is less a description of somewhere than a longing for it. What it longs for is a life in which the body, the community and the natural world agree with one another, so that following your own nature and living among others are no longer in conflict.
The imagined islands are defined largely by what the speaker's own shoreline lacks. His world is a place where water "sucks at my step" and the tides are "driftwood-smeared," a murky, clinging, littered picture. The islands, by contrast, are "accurate" and "sheathed in harmonious sea." The word "accurate" is a surprising one to apply to land, as though the islands were exactly right, a correct answer in a world of approximations. Where the speaker's own waters are "promiscuous," meaning indiscriminate and mixed, the island sea keeps everything in its proper relation. The poem's moral vocabulary is revealing here: "grave," "responsible," "formalities," "decorum," "laws." These are words of order and restraint, yet the poem insists they bring freedom rather than confinement.
That paradox is the heart of the poem. The young people on the islands are "naked" and "free of catchments," yet they are also learning "responsible voice." Their blood is "an interior music / Of laws." Dickey asks us to imagine law not as something imposed from outside but as something felt from within, like a pulse. The image of "the vein's pulse under the hiding skin" being "bared" makes this physical: the rule of life is already inside the body, and the ideal community is one where nothing hides it. Freedom here means being unobstructed rather than unruled.
The tree is the poem's other central image, and it works as a quiet model for this harmony. It appears first as the "increasing tree" that "affords its nourishment gladly, in ripe wisdom," and is "made sacred by the accepting hand." Giving and receiving are matched, with neither side grasping. By the end, the tree "wills to live with decorum" in "its own sureness of its relevancy." Notice how a tree, which we think of as simply growing, is given will and manners. The poem treats nature and civilization as the same kind of thing, which is why "Tree, town and shoal" can be listed together, each "tuned to their understanding." The fruit imagery in the third stanza, where daily purposes "quicken / To the center of the fruit, to the bright seed," pushes the same idea: even ordinary occasions move inward toward something living and essential.
Formally, the poem is quite controlled. It runs to five quatrains in a loose, roughly iambic pentameter, with lines that sometimes stretch a little longer or shorter. Rhyme is present but understated and irregular. "Land" and "hand" chime in the second stanza, and "tree" and "relevancy" close the last, but the poem never settles into a strict pattern. This suits its subject: the music is real but felt rather than imposed, much like the "interior music" the young are said to hear. Long, winding sentences carry across line breaks and even across stanzas. Stanza three, for instance, has no verb like "I imagine" at all and simply begins "How in that place," so the vision seems to flow on without needing its frame.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to treat order and liberty as opposites. Many visions of an ideal place picture either wild freedom or strict discipline. Dickey pictures a world where the two have become the same thing, and he does so through concrete images, such as skin, sap, seed and sea, so that a rather abstract idea stays bodily and alive. The poem also stays honest about its status. It never says such islands exist; it only says "I imagine." That hesitation, and the murky shore the speaker is standing on, give the vision its poignancy.