"Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea" is a poem written by Sylvia Plath that was first published in 1955, the year she graduated from Smith College summa cum laude.
[1] An abstract poem about an absent lover, it uses clear, vivid language to describe seaside scenery, with "a grim insistence" on reality rather than romance and imagination.
[2] The poem's literary allusions include references to Herman Melville's Moby Dick, William Shakespeare's The Tempest, and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.
[12] As "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber" was written during Plath's college years, it can be considered part of her juvenilia, but it is not characteristic of this period of her work.
[9] Wagner-Martin writes that the poem is typical of Plath's pre-Cambridge period and is "more about the poetic imagination than the two lovers of the title".