At first reading, one immediately realizes that James Wright's “At the Slackening of the Tide” is a poem of disillusionment. The narrator, apparently a poet, came to the beach to enjoy the beauty of nature and to compose; but the accidental drowning which he witnessed brought to his mind the lurking horror which is at the center of things and robbed him of the ability to take pleasure in the beauty which may be found at the surface of life. Though he has been aware of the implications of his dark suspicion that life is a result of a blind collocation of atoms, he had allowed them to drift deep into his consciousness until the shock of the sight of the floating body, the leaping woman, and the vomiting, impotent lifeguard had set his mind in philosophical motion, the ineluctable destination of which was the emotional and intellectual dead end of scientific determinism.

The element which provides the tension in the poem is the implicit conflict between the Christian and scientific conceptions of the origin and meaning of life. The poem has been patterned into stanzas arranged out of chronological order so that the implications of this conflict do not become apparent until the final stanza. The full force of the narrator's reaction to the incident which motivated the poem becomes evident in the fourth stanza where we learn of his contemplation of suicide. The fifth and sixth stanzas draw the picture into more clearly defined philosophical focus. It is not merely the horror of sudden death which wrings his mind but the shattering impression that there is nothing at all at the center of existence. How in the face of such a suspicion can one enjoy beauty? Hence the brutally raw sarcasm of “What did I do to kill my time today … Sit there, admiring sunlight on a shell?” The narrator, it seems, cannot endure the notion of a spiritual vacuum; beauty in a world without meaning is perhaps more horrible than ugliness: the relation of the search for the “whorl and coil that pretty up the earth” has, at the beginning of the final stanza, been transformed into the description of the narrator's staring at the sea, “abstract with terror of the shell,” terror of the emptiness in beauty.

What really anchors his despair, however, and accounts for the violence of his disillusionment is his perception of a more hopeful view of life, a view which he has had to abandon—reluctantly, we may assume,—and which, consequently, embitters his perspective. The irony which draws the poem to its conclusion becomes overt with “… God brooded for the living all one day.” This line obviously suggests Genesis—but with some important modifications. The duality of brooded seems theologically appropriate: Ideas of creation and solicitude—one thinks of Milton's “Dovelike sat'st brooding. …” in Paradise Lost—are evoked. But the line concludes with the subtle and searching diminution of “all one day,” and the field is given over to the scientists. Bowing his head, the narrator had hoped for some intuition of a sympathetic force in life—something to blur the image of horror which had imprinted itself on his mind—only to hear the coldly impersonal sea, like Pontius Pilate, absolve itself of guilt. With such a culmination other intimations in the poem assume meaning. The skinny lifeguard, the ironic symbol of Christ, grandly “rose up from the waves,” but this suggestion of baptismal resurrection was quickly deflated by the all-conquering scientific motif of “Like a sea-lizard with the scales washed off?” And one remembers that the lifeguard had, after bursting forth from the water, raged at the sky, vomited sea, and fainted on the sand.

His anguished impulse toward belief stifled, the narrator found everything around him reinforcing his perception of the dominance of a death rather than a life force: the cold simplicity of evening, the sagging sea which stretched indifferently on its side, and the hungry dog which announced what he had known all along—that one cannot believe in weeping naiads, for there is nothing in or outside of nature which has sympathy or concern for the living.