Stanza 1 Summary

Lines 1-2

The Tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;

• The tide rises, and the tide falls. The poem begins with this little factoid, as if we didn't already know. (If you want to know what that might look like, though, here's a time-lapse of video of, well, a tide rising and falling.)
• Now the speaker isn't just giving us a little science lesson, but setting the scene.
• In the second line of the poem he tells us that the "twilight darkens," and that the "curlew calls."
• A curlew, for those non-birders out there, is a type of shore bird. The evening is getting darker, and this little bird is calling.
• Given our setting thus far, what with the night coming on, we can guess that this is a poem about the end of something. It's almost as if the bird is calling somebody home, or announcing to the world that the end (of… something) is in sight. (Check out "Setting" for more.)
• It's not clear yet, but maybe this is a poem about death. The rising tide could be a metaphor for our journey through life. If that's the case, then all that other stuff—the darkening twilight, the tide falling, the curlew calling—could be a metaphor for death. 
• We'll just have to keep reading to see what Mr. Longfellow is up to in this poem. (In the meantime, here's a home video of a curlew call for your viewing pleasure.)

Lines 3-5

Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveler hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

• In the speaker's scene, there's a traveler walking along the shore ("sea-sands"), which happens to be damp and brown (yeah, that makes sense).
• He's hurrying towards a nearby town. Maybe he lives there, or maybe's it's still happy hour at his favorite pub and he wants to make sure he gets a good deal on the oysters. Maybe he's just tired and worn down and wants to get to an inn to rest for the night. Or maybe he's a she. We don't get much of a back story in this stanza.
• Any way you slice it, it's clear that this guy really wants to get to town. Given all the images in this poem (twilight, a tide rising and falling, etc.), we're led to ask, is he near the end of his life? Is this guy's journey to town yet another metaphor for death? Could the "town" be a metaphor for wherever we go when we die?
• Sadly, we don't get an answer to that question. Instead, the speaker simply tells us (for the second time now) that "the tide rises, and the tide falls." Let's keep an eye out to see if this little refrain persists for the rest of the poem.
• To be perfectly honest, it really sounds like the speaker is giving us a more elegant version of "life goes on," or "you're born, you live, and then you die," almost as if the rise and fall of the tide were just a metaphor for life itself. 
• Here's something else that's neat. So far, this poem is all about going away and returning, rising and falling, ups and downs, right? 
• Well, the meter of this poem reflects that kind of back and forth. Some of the lines are written in iambic tetrameter (that means that each line has four iambs), whereas others aren't. The meter, then, goes (drum roll)… back and forth, from one type of meter to another. Don't stress about the technical details too much here, though. You can read more about this over at "Form and Meter."
• For now, let's keep going and see if we get some answers about all this rising and falling business.