The Sea-Bell

rdf:langString The Sea-Bell

rdf:langString I heard a sea-bell swing in the swell,...

rdf:langString I walked by the sea, and there came to me,

rdf:langString In the twilight beyond the deep

rdf:langString a white shell like a sea-bell;

rdf:langString as a star-beam on the wet sand,

rdf:langString to a forgotten strand in a strange land.

rdf:langString wrapped in a mist, wound in a sleep,

rdf:langString trembling it lay in my wet hand... Then I saw a boat silently float

rdf:langString On the night-tide, empty and grey... It bore me away, wetted with spray,

rdf:langString Lines from the poem

rdf:langString "The Sea-Bell" or "Frodos Dreme" is a poem with elaborate rhyme scheme and metre by J.R.R. Tolkien in his 1962 collection of verse The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. It was a revision of a 1934 poem called "Looney". The first-person narrative speaks of finding a white shell "like a sea-bell", and of being carried away to a strange and beautiful land. The poet W. H. Auden thought it Tolkien's finest poem. It has been related to the Irish immram tradition of tales and medieval dream vision poetry. 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.