At home the sea is in the town,
Running in and out of the cooking places,
With these opening lines, the speaker invites the reader to identify not just as a sympathetic observer but as an inhabitant of the flooded town. The poem's very first words, "At home," more or less command the reader to think of the poem's coastal setting as their own home, establishing it as "home" before any other attributes have been introduced. The use of definite articles in the phrases "the sea," "the town," and "the cooking places," also suggest that these entities are familiar to the reader, further urging the reader to think of this town as their own home. This does not merely aim to increase the reader's sympathy and identification with the characters. It also suggests that, for the speaker and the characters, there is only one relevant home, sea, and town—the destruction is all the more unthinkable precisely because their lives are so completely wrapped up in this particular place.
It is a sad thing to hear the wails,
And the mourning shouts of the women,
Calling on all the gods they worship,
To protect them from the angry sea.
These lines of the poem convey the tragedy of this event and its impact on the town's residents. At the same time, Awoonor's description has a distancing effect, making readers feel somewhat disconnected from the events being described. The phrase "It is a sad thing" weighs down the start of the line with plodding abstraction, removing urgency before the arrival of more concrete aural imagery later in the stanza. Meanwhile, rather than pinpoint any particular character, the speaker talks generally of "women," giving a sense of the tragedy's scale but not of its impact on individuals.
Her hands on her breasts,
Weeping mournfully,
Her ancestors have neglected her,
Her gods have deserted her,
These lines echo and contrast with the previously quoted ones from the poem's third stanza. While both mention wailing women searching for some form of divine intervention, this description takes the previous lines' generalities and distills them into a single character's plight. It hones in on Aku's relationship to "her gods," the possessive pronoun hinting at a sense of personal betrayal, while the mention of "her ancestors" reminds readers of each resident's unique family history and identity. Meanwhile, the description of Aku standing with her hands on her breasts lends her a concrete bodily presence, giving readers a route to physically identify with her and picture her vividly.
In the sea that eats the land at home,
Eats the whole land at home.
These closing lines tie together the early stanzas of the poem, with their refrain of "The sea eats the land at home," to its later ones. In doing so, they link the myth-like hyperbole and distance of its first three stanzas with the specificity of the final stanza. By linking these two very different halves of the poem, Awoonor lends accessibility and humanity to the mythological, and lends gravitas to the detailed.
