Summary
The sea floods a town that the speaker identifies as their home. Its tide invades the places where people cook, and it picks up firewood before spitting it back up on the shore. It seems to be eating away at the land, ever since it arrived in the night, wrecking walls and sweeping up people's chickens and cooking utensils. The speaker comments on how sad it is to hear people crying and begging their gods to intervene on their behalf.
Analysis
This poem has a somewhat unusual form, evident from one look at the page. It begins with three short stanzas: two five-line quintets and one four-line quatrain. These give way to a single closing stanza, longer than the first three put together. The form gives us a clue that, while the early stanzas might be more ballad-like and relatively stylized, the latter half of the poem will likely feel less controlled and more prose-like. It's certainly true that these three opening stanzas have a folk song–like style. They lack a totally consistent meter, but the poem's opening line is written in iambic tetrameter, easing us in with a lulling rhythm. While subsequent lines aren't entirely iambic, Awoonor does tend to fall into iambs, keeping up an underlying—if unpredictable—thrum of meter. Meanwhile, Awoonor establishes a sort of refrain, even though it's really only repeated twice: he ends the first two stanzas with the identical lines "The sea eats the land at home," and ends the third with the related-but-modified line "To protect them from the angry sea." The use of a refrain also recalls folk music and oral speech generally, as does the personification of the sea. The choice to personify objects or natural phenomena, imbuing them with detail while refraining from similar detail when describing human beings, is common in folk stories worldwide.
Furthermore, in a style typical of oral folklore, Awoonor shies away from specifics in these stanzas. He instead speaks very generally, leaving readers uncertain as to exactly when and where the events being described take place. Rather than using proper nouns, Awoonor chooses archetypal-sounding categories, among them land, sea, home, hearths, gods, and women. This, once again, makes the poem sound like a folk song—a story told repeatedly, focusing on emotional impact and memorability rather than transmitting detailed information. It has a second effect as well—by telling a dramatic story without specifics, Awoonor gives readers an opening for symbolic as well as literal interpretations.
For instance, it is possible to interpret the poem's flooding as an extended metaphor about the destruction caused by colonialism. In this reading, the sea represents an invasive outside force causing both material and emotional damage without regard for the well-being of residents. Interestingly—though this poem was written in the 1960s, before climate change was widely discussed—it is possible to link this particular interpretation to a more literal reading about natural disaster. In many cases, the legacy of colonialism has caused people in Africa and the global south generally to reap most of the consequences of global warming, even while former colonizing powers use the resources that cause warming in the first place. This particular interpretive lens is an interesting example of how a piece of literature can gain resonance beyond an author's original intention.
