Would you change if you went to this place?

In this essay I will try to explain the poem through several themes and I will write about the structures, the
language that is used and the main ideas.

INTRODUCTION
This poem is about a man who is at a beach with two boys making a campfire lit. He´s trying to pick some
mussels but at some point through this journey he´s going to find out that his stay is going to take an unexpected
turn. He is going to realize that he´s going to dive into loneliness, death, self-discover and mankind.

BODY
Through the poem I could spot out some language devices like metaphors, repetition and allusion. "There’s the
excrescent moon sponging off the last of it", in this quotation we can see that the moon is acting like a sponge, but
there it is not the metaphor but it is in the fact that the moon is actually taking the sun´s light off. The author is
trying to explain that this natural fact (the sun going away so the moon appears because of nighttime) can be taken
as if the moon and the sun were able to fight for the other´s life. Another device is Allusion. We can take the same
quotation as before to explain the allusion. Allusion to the fact that they are both natural things but in this case we
can see that the author is giving them life and he is trying to make us see that they are taking the other´s life,
because they cannot appear both together at the same time. The last device I could notice is repetition. The word
"DOWN" is repeated several times along the poem. The author is trying to add a depressing mood and he can even
describe danger too.

The author has not chosen a consistent pattern of rhythm to structure the poem. The lines have a very similar
length which leads to a unified text. It is emphasized in a free verse style.

Across the poem the writer tries to make us perceive different themes. As we all know the character is at the
beach. But he does not belong there. He is trespassing. He has no right to take something from the sea (mussels).
The theme the natural world and mankind's place is very well described as we can notice that the man is trying to
compete against the sea but he will never win as it is more powerful; “Nobody comes up from the sea”. He thinks he
is more powerful than nature but it reminds him that it is not the case but weaker. Over the verses another theme
that is revealed is DEATH: “is a hesitancy of the earth rolling back and away behind this man going down to the sea
with a bag to pick mussels”. The man exposes himself. He is in danger. Maybe the man knows he is dying so he
wants to die on his own terms. So he goes to the sea to “pick up mussels” as a shade, as if he had a kind of
arrangement with the sea. So the sea acts like death and is taking him away. Another theme that is exposed is
LONELINESS: “Down you go alone”. When someone dies he/she dies alone. The man is kind of enjoying being alone
and not being spoken to. He knew that nobody goes to the beach to pick mussels. He is waiting for the light to go
away “one hour’s light to be left”. It seems that he´s anxious about it. We can say that the moon is alone too up in
the sky absorbing the sun's light “there’s the excrescent moon sponging off the last of it”. So the moon is alone too
and takes the sun light and as a consequence the sun dies. There is no option there, it is one or another. The sun or
the moon. The last theme is SELF-DISCOVERY: “Nobody comes up” “nobody else goes down”.  He chooses this
particular place. It´s connected with himself. He always go there to pick up mussels. The title says “YOU” so we can
consider you as any person. We can say that everyone can go to this place. He enters to the beach as one man and at
the end he is not the same one.

Conclusion
In this essay I named the structure of the poem and the themes that it includes. When I started this essay I
wrote a question: “Would you change if you went to his place?”. I think all of us would change if we experienced the
same situations that happen along the poem.