Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea

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Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea is a poem written by Sylvia Plath that was first published in 1955. It was awarded the Glascock Prize that same year.

Cold and final, the imagination

Shuts down its fabled summer house;

Blue views are boarded up; our sweet vacation

Dwindles in the hour-glass.

Thoughts that found a maze of mermaid hair

Tangling in the tide's green fall

Now fold their wings like bats and disappear

Into the attic of the skull.

We are not what we might be; what we are

Outlaws all extrapolation

Beyond the interval of now and here:

White whales are gone with the white ocean.

A lone beachcomber squats among the wrack

Of kaleidoscope shells

Probing fractured Venus with a stick

Under a tent of taunting gulls.

No sea-change decks the sunken shank of bone

That chucks in backtrack of the wave;

Though the mind like an oyster labors on and on,

A grain of sand is all we have.

Water will run by; the actual sun

Will scrupulously rise and set;

No little man lives in the exacting moon

And that is that, is that, is that.

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