One suggestion is that Tennyson composed it while crossing the Solent from Aldworth to Farringford on the Isle of Wight, after suffering a serious illness; alternatively, that he wrote it on a yacht anchored in Salcombe, where there is a moaning sandbar.
"[1] The words were set to music in April 1890 as a song[2] for high voice and piano by Charles Villiers Stanford and as an 1893 hymn, "Freshwater", for four-part chorus by Sir Hubert Parry.
Other settings include those by Sir Joseph Barnby, Geoffrey Shaw, Charles Ives,[3] Gwyneth Van Anden Walker and John Philip Sousa.
British folk music group The Longest Johns released their own cover of this poem in 2018 in their album Between Wind and Water.
A 2024 four-part arrangement by Craig McLeish was written for "Sing to Save Lives", a project celebrating the bicentenary of the RNLI.