Immediately after that, the writer uses the imagery of the sea to illustrate the theme of the harshness of life. "It tells/ How the sea took me swept me back/ And forth in sorrows and fear and pain." In reading this poem it becomes obvious that life is represented by the sea. In this line the person is saying that that he has been swept away by the trials of life. The author continues with the imagery of the sea throughout the entire piece. "Showed me suffering in a hundred ships,/ In a thousand ports and in me. It tells/ Of the smashing surf when I sweated in the cold/ Of an anxious watch, perched in the bow/ As it dashed under cliffs My feet were cast." Through the next few lines the author shows the reader that man is scared of life and what it has in store for him in the same way that he is scared on a ship out at sea. The author uses the feeling of this person out at sea, "when I sweated in the cold/ Of anxious watch" as a parallel to the anxiousness and fear of what life will bring. In describing the man"s soul as being "sea weary," the author is demonstrating man"s lack of control over his life. The waves of the sea, and the sea itself, are uncontrollable and this is how the person in the poem feels about his life and his soul. "The only sound was the roaring sea." This suggests that the hardships of life overpower other aspects of the person"s life. Roaring implies something being extremely loud and unavoidable, indicating that the harshness of life is always staring one in the face and cannot be escaped. The reference that the author to "the freezing waves" also represents the unavoidable difficult times in life. Here the word "freezing" brings to mind extreme coldness, being trapped, and even death. The next referral to the sea reinforces this theory, "To a soul left drowning in desolation.