The Sea-Bell

The scholar of English literature Verlyn Flieger calls the poem "a cry of longing for lost beauty", and relates it to the sense of alienation many of Tolkien's generation felt on returning from the First World War.

Tolkien's mock-academic framing of the collection suggests that, although the poem may not have been composed by Frodo Baggins, it was associated with him by its readers and reflects the dark dreams that plagued him in his final days in the Shire.

It bore me away, wetted with spray,wrapped in a mist, wound in a sleep,to a forgotten strand in a strange land.In the twilight beyond the deepI heard a sea-bell swing in the swell,...

The poem touches on many themes which are recurrent in Tolkien's work: mortality, the otherworld, alienation, desire, suffering, pride, the sea and nature.

[3] Other scholars have noted that Tolkien wrote a series of works featuring Irish Otherworld voyages, including his childhood Roverandom and the later "Bilbo's Last Song".

[10][11] The scholar of English literature Verlyn Flieger calls the poem "a cry of longing for lost beauty", and relates the poem to the sense of alienation many of Tolkien's generation felt on returning from the First World War, but notes that it differs from many literary responses to the war by operating 'in the fantastic mode, rather than the realistic'.

[1] She has also argued that the final association of "The Sea-Bell" with Frodo gives the poem considerably more depth than it had in its 1934 recension and adds much to our understanding of the central character of The Lord of the Rings.

Where Tolkien uses positive, even romantic images of nature, with " green-ness, water, heart's ease, flowers, star, river, animals and birds", Yeats uses lowly, even disgusting organisms: dead fish, a lugworm, knot-grass, worms.

Both open with a collision of the known and unknown worlds, Tolkien's "I walked by the sea", Yeats's different in each verse, as in "He wandered by the sands" or "He mused beside the well".

Bridgwater writes that the theme of vanishing Faery is traditional and that Tolkien used it not just in The Sea-Bell (lines 53ff) but in The Hobbit where the Hobbit and Dwarves, lost in the great forest of Mirkwood, try vainly to approach the Elves, just as the medieval Sir Orfeo sees the King of Elfland's hunt go past at a distance: being lost in a haunted forest poetically parallels being out of one's mind.