The Meaning Behind One of My Favourite Poems

Some of my poems appear in my head while I am asleep and I wake up with an idea in my mind. Others do not arrive as loudly. They do not enter my imagination with a dramatic confession or a wound held up to the light. They arrive quietly, almost like subtle changes in weather. You only realise later that something in them has stayed.

For me, one of those poems is “The Watcher of the Tides.” For literary critics, probably it will not be one of the most impressive poems in A Thousand Moments. It does not try to explain everything. It does not rush towards comfort. It does not offer a neat answer at the end. And perhaps that is why I love it.

It gives the reader a shore. A tide. A watcher. A question. Then it lets the silence around those things do some of the work. The poem begins with movement, but not the kind of movement we can control.

“The tide does not hurry. It moves with the pull of unseen forces, a rhythm older than time itself. It laps at the shore, soft and sure, then retreats into the vastness, carrying secrets whispered by the deep.” - from the poem “The Watcher of the Tides,” A Thousand Moments by Astrid Morwen

That first line matters to me. The tide does not hurry. There is something almost instructive in that, though the poem does not preach. The tide does not need to be told when to come in. It does not panic when it retreats. It does not apologise for moving according to a rhythm older than anyone standing on the shore. It simply moves. Soft and sure.

For me, the tide became a way of writing about the parts of life we cannot force. Love. Loss. Grieving. Healing. Letting go. Waiting. Change. Acceptance. The quiet pull of things we do not fully understand until much later or never. We often want life to move on our schedule.

We want grief to soften when we are tired of carrying it. We want love to become clear when uncertainty frightens us. We want healing to hurry because pain is exhausting. We want answers before we have made peace with the question.

But the tide does not work that way. And neither does the heart. That is the first meaning behind the poem for me: not everything can be rushed into understanding. Some things move by a rhythm we have to learn to respect.

The watchers stand at the edge of this movement, but they do not command it. They are close enough to witness the tide, but not powerful enough to hold it.

“The watcher stands at the edge, bare feet sinking into the cool sand, eyes fixed on the horizon where the sea and sky blur into one. The tide does not pause for them. It comes and goes, a steady breath that cannot be held.” - from the poem “The Watcher of the Tides,” A Thousand Moments by Astrid Morwen

I think many of us know that feeling. Standing at the edge of something we cannot stop. A goodbye. A change. A child growing older. A season ending. A dream becoming different from what we imagined. A person slowly becoming memory. A version of ourselves we can no longer return to.

The watchers are not weak because they cannot stop the tide. They are human. They are standing where so many of us stand: at the edge of change, trying to understand what can be held and what has to move. That is why I did not want the poem to be over the top. The sea is dramatic enough. The tide is already saying what needs to be said.

Sometimes the poet’s work is not to add more feeling, but to step back and let the image carry it. The watcher’s bare feet matter because they make the poem physical. This is not only a thought about change. It is a body standing in cool sand. It is the sensation of sinking slightly into a place that will not stay the same. It is the human need to feel grounded while everything else moves.

That contrast interests me. The body seeks grounding. The tide keeps moving. The eyes look towards the horizon. The horizon refuses to become fully clear. That is life, sometimes. We stand with our feet in what is real, looking towards what we cannot yet understand.

The poem also holds a kind of humility. The watcher is present, but they are not the centre of the sea. The waves have their own stories. The ocean has carried lives, storms, losses, returns, and secrets long before this person arrived.

"Each wave tells a story: of distant storms, of ships lost and found, of the moon’s quiet pull on the restless waters. Yet none of these stories belong to the watcher. They are only a witness, a speck on the shore, small against the endless blue.” - from the poem “The Watcher of the Tides,” A Thousand Moments by Astrid Morwen

I love that idea: being only a witness. Not everything we observe belongs to us. Not every story is ours to claim. Not every mystery is there for us to solve.

There is a kind of peace in that, though it may not feel like peace at first. We live in a world that often asks us to explain, respond, choose, define, and decide quickly. But some experiences ask something quieter from us. To stand still. To listen. To accept that we are small. To understand that being small does not mean being meaningless.

The watcher is small against the endless blue, but the moment still matters. In fact, perhaps it matters because of that smallness. The poem is not trying to make the speaker powerful. It is trying to make them honest. There are places in life where we are not meant to control the whole thing. What if we are meant to just notice. We are meant to learn. What if we are meant to be changed by what we cannot own.

This is also part of the author's craft behind writing the poem. I wanted the sea to remain larger than the speaker. I did not want to reveal if the watcher is a he or a she. If the poem had explained too much, it would have made everything even the ocean smaller. If it had turned the tide into one clear lesson too quickly, it would have lost some of its mystery.

The sea should feel like the sea. Not only a symbol. Not only an emotional tool. A real presence with its own voice. That is important to me when writing from nature's perspective. I do not want nature to become a decorative backdrop. I want it to remain alive. Larger than us. Indifferent sometimes. Comforting sometimes. Honest always.

The tide is not there to flatter the watcher. It keeps moving. It teaches by being itself. And then, near the end of the poem, the ocean speaks.

“And as the tide recedes once more, the ocean speaks in its endless voice: What will you let go of, so you can flow as freely as I do?” - from the poem “The Watcher of the Tides,” A Thousand Moments by Astrid Morwen

That question is the centre of the poem. Not because it gives an answer, but because it opens one. What will you let go of? It is a simple question, but not an easy one.

There are things we hold close because we love them. Things we hold because we fear what will happen if we loosen our grip. Old versions of ourselves. Old pain. Old hopes. Old arguments. Memories. Relationships. Old shame. Old dreams that once helped us survive, but no longer fit the life we are living now.

Letting go is often spoken about as if it is graceful. As if it is a clean gesture. As if we simply open our hands and feel lighter. But letting go is rarely that simple. Sometimes it is clumsy. Sometimes it happens in pieces. Sometimes we let go in the mind before the body follows. Sometimes we think we have released something, then find it again in a song, an image, a season, a sudden ache in our chest we did not invite.

That is why sometimes the question matters more than an answer would. The poem does not say: let go of this. It asks: what are you still carrying? Only the reader can answer that. Only the watcher can answer that. And in the poem, the watcher does not answer at all.

“The watcher does not answer. The tide returns, the waves unbroken, and the ocean continues its song, as it always has, as it always will.” - from the poem “The Watcher of the Tides,” A Thousand Moments" by Astrid Morwen

That ending was important to me. The watcher does not answer. Because sometimes we are not ready. Sometimes the question reaches us before the courage does. Sometimes the poem has done enough by helping us hear the question clearly. I did not want the ending to feel too neat. I did not want the watcher to suddenly understand everything, release everything, and walk away healed. That would have been too easy. Too polished. Too false?

Life often leaves us with questions before it gives us peace. And sometimes the peace begins with not answering too quickly. The tide returns. The waves are unbroken. The ocean continues its song. That is not indifference, exactly. It is continuity. It is the world reminding us that life keeps moving, whether we are ready or not. There is tenderness in that, and there is severity too.

The poem does not rescue the watcher. It lets the watcher remain there. Small. Quiet. Asked. Changed, perhaps, but not finished. Carrying its burdens. That feels honest to me. It gives the watcher so much dignity by letting them just be without forcing a happy ending. Because a poem does not always need to complete the emotional journey. Sometimes it only needs to bring the reader to the place where the real question begins.

That is what “The Watcher of the Tides” does for me. It is a poem about letting go, yes. But it is also about humility. About witnessing. About standing at the edge of something larger than yourself. About learning that not every rhythm bends to your will. Trusting that retreat is not failure. The tide retreats, but it returns. It leaves, but it is not gone. It moves away, but its movement is part of the whole pattern.

That has meaning beyond the sea. There are seasons in life when we withdraw. When we need quiet time. A sanctuary. When we cannot keep arriving for everyone in the same way. When something in us has to recede before it can return. The tide teaches that retreat is not always defeat. Sometimes it is rhythm. Sometimes it is survival. Sometimes it is the only way to keep moving freely.

That is one of the gentlest meanings I find in the poem: we do not have to stay at full tide all the time. We are allowed to ebb. We are allowed to gather ourselves. We are allowed to move with a rhythm that other people may not understand. In a world that often praises constant availability, constant productivity, constant certainty, fast response time, there is something deeply freeing about the tide. It does not explain itself. It does not apologise for leaving the shore. It does not ask permission to return. It belongs to its own movement.

Perhaps that is why the poem feels peaceful to me, even though it carries a hard question. It does not demand an immediate transformation. It simply places the reader beside the sea and lets the tide do what the tide has always done. Trust your journey. Come in. Go out. Return. Withdraw. Carry. Release. Continue.

As a writer, I am drawn to poems like this because they leave room to be true self. They do not close the reader inside one meaning. They offer an image strong enough to hold many choices, many destinations, many lives. One person may read this poem and think of grief. Another may think of an old relationship. Another may think of a child leaving home. Another may think of the pressure to become someone they are no longer meant to be.

Another may think of forgiveness. Another may think of rest.

That is the beauty of a poem built around a living image. The tide does not belong to one interpretation. It keeps moving through the reader’s own life. The meaning changes depending on what the reader is carrying. And perhaps that is the quiet goal of many of my poems: not to tell the reader what to think, but to give them a place where their own truth can surface.

For me, “The Watcher of the Tides” is a poem about the courage not to force an answer. It is about listening to what life asks when we stop filling every silence. It is about the strange comfort of standing small before something vast. It is about accepting that some things cannot be held, and that this does not make them meaningless.

Maybe the tide is not asking us to stop loving what we have lost.

Maybe it is not asking us to become untouched.

Maybe it is not asking us to become calm forever.

Maybe it is asking something simpler and harder:

Can you stop gripping what was never meant to stay still?

Can you let movement be part of love?

Can you let change be part of life?

Can you let yourself flow again?

The watcher does not answer.

And I like that.

Because some poems should not answer for us. Some poems should only bring us to the shore. Let us hear the water. Let us feel the sand under our feet. Let us stand with the question for a while.

PS: If you would like to continue walking through these reflections with me, you are warmly welcome to subscribe to Poetry & Reflections.

Join my monthly newsletter here.