The poem “Ebb” by Edna St. Vincent Millay is a portrayal of the heartbreak of losing a lover. The speaker seems to be a woman who was abandoned by her partner, and the poem is a solitary reflection on the feelings of love and loneliness. The poem starts with the lines: “I know what my heart is like / Since your love died,” and its tone is that of a contemplative self-reflection on the speaker’s inner emotional landscape. The poem consists of seven lines arranged in an irregular rhyme scheme. The diction is informal, with the author using common words, simple rhymes, and straightforward sentence structure.
The entire poem is a metaphor—a literary device that is aimed to compare two unrelated things to one another to produce a certain effect on the reader. In “Ebb,” the author uses water metaphors to reflect on the feelings of love and despair. Love is compared to the tide, and the feelings that are left after the love is gone are described as “a little tepid pond” held by a hollow ledge. The speaker feels like she is drying up as her love is fading away. The poem’s title is also metaphorical, with the abandoned lover’s heart being compared to the ebb when the tide is gone, and the beach is uncovered and empty. The height of the tide is used to describe the level of passion in a relationship.
Tidal metaphors are widely used in poetry to reflect on love and trauma, with the rhythms of the sea being compared to the cycles of a human’s emotional life. Water is often perceived as a symbol of love, and the depiction of tidal rhythms gives symbolic meaning to interpersonal relations or an individual’s emotional experiences. Price and Narchi (2018, p. 2) note that in poetry, “outgoing waters regularly figure as personal, cultural, or physical decay, while incoming waters often connote revivification, freshness, social exuberance, and new birth.” In “Ebb,” the tide symbolizes love, and the ebb refers to the parting.
Even without knowing the gender of the author, one gets a strong impression that the poem was written by a woman. The feelings of the speaker’s lover are portrayed as strong and overflowing, whereas the woman’s heart is compared to a shore covered by the tide. Its ledges are filled with the flow of feelings, and as the love comes and goes, the small ponds of water are left behind. A woman is depicted as a shore, while a man is an ocean.
In “Ebb,” the author manages to express the whole range of emotions after a heartbreak in deceptively primitive language and images. She uses simple words, no more than two syllables in length, simple rhymes (“like”—”tide,” “ledge”— “edge”), short lines, and straightforward sentence structure. It provides a contrast between the depth of the metaphors and the tools used to depict them. No words describing feelings are used; however, a vivid picture of the speaker’s thoughts and emotional state is created. The complex feelings of sadness, despair, loneliness, and abandonment are encapsulated in the image of the small pool of water “drying inward from the edge.” The speaker acts like a detached and dispassionate observer of her own inner life and emotional landscape. The poem is filled with deep symbolism and evokes strong emotions in the reader despite its simple structure and language.
Reference
Price, L., & Narchi, N. (2018). Coastal heritage and cultural resilience. Springer.