Here's the text of the Frost poem, "Once by the Pacific," that I recently called the best ever written about the Pacific Ocean as seen from the shore:
The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God's last Put out the light was spoken.
It's a traditional form, a sonnet, with the ostensible subject of "nature," and moreover rhymes chimingly, all characteristics that align it with a million other poems concerning how the mind of God is expressed in nature. Yes, says Frost, but it's not the good news that you think. I love the way in which, close to the end, a single sentence fills out a single line: "Somebody had better be prepared for rage." It's a way of highlighting. You have to know too that in the Book of Genesis all of history begins with God declaring, "Let there be light."
And will end, according to this poem, with Him angry, disgusted, and admitting His act of creation was a mistake. Put out the light.
Frost has this reputation for being a practical Yankee poet who espoused the virtues of work, patriotism, and faith. Actually, his recurring subjects are madness, the distance (or silence, or absence) of God, the blank indifference (or malignity) of nature, and the end of the world. Here's another of my favorites, a savage rebuke of the idea behind a lot of "creationist" bunk.
As to poems about the sea, one of the few rivals to "Once by the Pacific" is by Housman:
Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.
The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault:
It rains into the sea
And still the sea is salt.
