The setting and motif of the sea is woven throughout the poem, both literally and figuratively. The speaker references the shore and waves that were restricted by their father, but the poem also uses nautical imagery like “the mourning of the darkest sea” (Line 3). Traditionally, tales in this folkloric category often feature men who work with the sea in some way, such as fishermen or shipbuilders. Thus, the shoreline represents a divide between the structured, human world and the wild, unpredictable world from which the speaker’s mother was taken. As a place in between two landscapes and two worlds, it parallels the speaker themself who is also a being caught between these two polarities.