BY THE SHORE
Everything Is Where It Should Be. Nothing Behaves as It Should.
“By the Shore” does not invent a fantasy world. That would be easier. It gives us the world we already know — the evening tide, trees, a bay, seashells, a pier, clouds, dunes, waves, islands, seabirds — and then quietly withdraws the restrictions governing what those things are allowed to do. The nouns remain innocent. The verbs commit all the crimes. Nothing needs to transform into a mythical creature, no portal opens, and no narrator announces a dream. The shore remains recognizably a shore while the tide sails through trees, seashells wander away in search of brighter days, water blooms, clouds rest in sand, waves brush the sky, islands roam and daylight eventually lies down somewhere beyond the seabirds. Everything is where it should be. Nothing behaves as it should.
The opening establishes the method immediately:
The evening tide sails through the trees
And round the bay
A tide does not sail. A ship sails upon a tide. The lyric has taken the verb belonging to the traveler and given it to the medium through which the traveler moves. But then comes the greater impossibility: the tide sails “through the trees.” What gives the line its peculiar force is not merely that this cannot happen; it is that the song does not notice that it cannot happen. There is no like, as though, seems to or in my dreams. The grammar offers no escape hatch back into ordinary reality. The tide simply sails through the trees, and the next line — “And round the bay” — is so geographically ordinary that it almost launders the impossibility preceding it. The impossible action has been placed inside perfectly respectable syntax.
Viktor Shklovsky’s idea of defamiliarization is useful here. Shklovsky argued that art can interrupt habitual perception and make familiar things perceptible again. Later empirical work by David Miall and Don Kuiken connected literary foregrounding and defamiliarization with increased strikingness and affect. “By the Shore” accomplishes something related with remarkably simple language. It does not invent an exotic tide; it gives us the tide we already know and changes one of its permissions. A dragon flying through trees belongs comfortably to fantasy. A tide sailing through trees belongs nowhere. Yet within two lines, the song has made room for it.
The seashells are next:
The seashells drift
And wander off for brighter days
“Drift” initially preserves a natural explanation. Shells can drift with moving water. “Wander off” introduces agency, and by “for brighter days,” that agency has become emotional. The shells apparently possess not only locomotion but hope. The phrase is effective precisely because “brighter days” is so ordinary: it belongs to human language for endurance and expectation. We wait for brighter days; we leave bad circumstances in search of them. The lyric gives that familiar human possibility to objects normally abandoned wherever the sea happens to leave them. The effect is more poignant than whimsical. Something discarded by the tide has apparently decided that being left behind is not good enough.
Then the geography begins changing faster:
Beyond the pier
The waters bloom
The clouds break forth and rest
In turtle sand
Here the song reveals that its surrealism is not a collection of unrelated peculiarities but a developing system. Water blooms. Clouds rest in sand. The sea acquires the behavior of vegetation while the sky acquires the behavior of terrestrial bodies. The categories are not merely breaking apart; they are exchanging abilities. “The waters bloom” may be the purest example. Nothing about the sentence itself is difficult — two elementary words joined by ordinary grammar — yet blooming belongs to organic growth, not water. The words are elementary. The ontology is not.
Then the clouds “break forth and rest / In turtle sand.” The phrase “turtle sand” is valuable because the song refuses to define it. It does not tell us that the sand resembles a turtle, belongs to turtles or occupies some identifiable category called turtle sand. The world of the song simply behaves as though the phrase refers to something perfectly real. That unexplained specificity strengthens the image. “Strange sand” would merely announce strangeness; “turtle sand” sounds almost geographical, as though it might appear on a map we have not been given. Its specificity does something subtler as well: it lends factual authority to the impossible. Precise language ordinarily reassures us that a speaker knows exactly what is being described. Here that confidence is attached to something we cannot even define. The stranger the world becomes, the more confidently it speaks about itself.
Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s work on conceptual integration becomes increasingly useful as the song develops. Conceptual blending allows structures normally belonging to different domains to participate in an emergent mental construction, while Seana Coulson and Todd Oakley have likewise explored the interaction of literal and figurative meaning within such blends. What matters here is that the song does not continually ask us to translate its images back into conventional language. Once its world is established, the blends begin acquiring lives of their own.
Then comes:
In summer’s best
The phrase hangs strangely in the air. Best weather? Best light? Best evening? Best memory? The lyric never completes the thought, and the omission enlarges it. The sailing tide, hopeful shells, blooming water, resting clouds and turtle sand have all apparently occurred within whatever “summer’s best” means. The surrealism is not interrupting the beautiful evening; it is the beautiful evening.
The dunes continue the transformation:
The dunes lie blue
The waves drift low
And brush the sky
This sequence is carefully graduated. Blue dunes remain plausible under evening light. Waves drifting low are stranger. Then the waves brush the sky and sea and heaven become contiguous. The verb brush is crucial because the waves do not strike the sky or tear into it; they brush it. The impossible contact is almost affectionate. This is where the song’s relation to historical Surrealism becomes particularly interesting. André Breton celebrated the power of bringing apparently remote realities into unexpected conjunction, but “By the Shore” does something subtler because its realities are not remote at all. Water, sand, clouds, trees, islands and sky already coexist naturally at the shore. The surrealism does not come from forcing alien worlds together. It comes from allowing neighboring worlds to exchange properties. Their ordinary proximity becomes permeability.
There is a reason the shore is the perfect place for this to happen. A shoreline appears to be a boundary, but even under ordinary physics it is an unstable one. Every advancing wave temporarily redraws it, and every retreating wave redraws it again. Tides alter its position over longer intervals; wind, erosion, sediment and storms alter it over longer ones still. We speak of “the shoreline” as though it were a fixed line on the world when the physical thing we are naming is a continuing negotiation between land and water. “By the Shore” therefore has not arbitrarily selected a stable border and destroyed it. It has chosen a boundary that was never entirely stable in the first place and enlarged that instability until it becomes metaphysical.
Then:
The shoreline leans
And carries us
A shell is a thing, a cloud is a thing, and a tree is a thing; a shoreline is a boundary. Its identity depends upon distinction. It tells us, however provisionally, that land is here and water is there. But once the shoreline “leans,” the boundary acquires a body, and once it “carries us,” the boundary acquires agency. The lovers are not simply being transported across the division between two worlds; they are being carried by the division itself. Suddenly the preceding images look less like violations imposed upon the shore than exaggerations of something the shore has always done. Land and water have always met there. Sea and sky have always appeared to meet at the horizon. Marine objects have always been deposited on land. Birds have always moved between water, earth and air. The song takes those ordinary negotiations among domains and removes the final restraints.
That distinguishes it from its companion piece, “Under the Stars.” There, the governing transformation is predominantly vertical: stars descend, the sky bends down, morning falls. Heaven progressively loses altitude until the distinction between above and below becomes unstable. “By the Shore” operates differently. Its world becomes porous. Sea, land and sky do not merely approach one another; they begin borrowing one another’s behaviors. The song is not abolishing geography so much as discovering how negotiable geography already was.
Then comes one of the lyric’s most economical suggestions:
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Beyond the mast
Through coral trees
The mast works precisely because the lyric does not tell us everything. It never needs to announce a vessel; one vertical feature is enough for the listener to supply one. “Coral trees” takes the process further. Coral already possesses branching forms reminiscent of vegetation, so the combination feels simultaneously wrong and strangely inevitable. By this point the song no longer requires us to decide whether these are trees made of coral, coral functioning as trees or something belonging to neither category. What began as an occasional collision between conceptual domains has become the governing logic of the environment. The blended things no longer need to be translated back into ordinary reality. They are inhabitants of the new one.
Then:
The islands roam
Two ordinary words overturn cartography. An island is not merely something that normally stays put; its identity is relational, land defined partly by the water surrounding it. If an island can roam while the water, tide and shoreline have themselves become mobile, something more fundamental than fixedness has disappeared. Location itself is beginning to behave differently. Ordinarily, location answers a question: Where is it? An island sits at coordinates, a shoreline marks an edge, and a mast identifies a vessel somewhere upon the water. But a roaming island turns where from a fixed condition into an activity. Location is no longer merely where something is; location has itself become a behavior. Mobility has migrated from things conventionally expected to move toward things expected to remain fixed. The tide sails, shells wander, the shoreline carries, islands roam. What once served as the stable background against which movement could be measured has entered the movement itself. Yet this is not randomness. The song has developed a coherent alternative order: the world is not lawless; it has simply accepted another physics.
That new physics reaches its most organic expression near the end:
We follow where tides breathe
Tides already contain something resembling respiration. They advance and withdraw, expand and contract, arrive and recede. Their movement is bodily before the lyric explicitly gives them a body. That makes “tides breathe” particularly interesting because it would have sounded conspicuously metaphorical near the beginning of the song. After roaming islands and a shoreline capable of carrying people, it almost sounds observational. The listener has changed along with the landscape: the song first makes familiar things strange, then, by constructing a sufficiently coherent strange world, begins making the strange familiar.
The final image completes the process:
Past seabirds where the daylight rests
The seabirds do nothing impossible, and that matters. By this point almost every major element of the landscape has acquired some new permission, yet the seabirds remain ordinary inhabitants of the shore, giving us one final measure of conventional reality. Beside them, daylight rests — not dies, disappears or even merely fades, but rests. The verb turns evening from extinction into repose. Daylight has become something capable of finding a place and lying down. Water blooms, clouds rest, waves touch heaven, a shoreline carries, islands roam, tides breathe and daylight rests. These are not arbitrary tricks. Properties that once belonged securely to one category have become available to another.
That is why the music matters so much. The song is conceived within the language of relaxed mid-century big-band swing: a mature baritone phrasing behind the beat, an understated rhythm section, upright bass, four-to-the-bar guitar, restrained drums, piano and warm organ, blended reeds, muted brass and subtle strings. Nothing in that musical environment announces that reality is being dismantled. Research into musical expectation by David Huron, Marcus Pearce and Geraint Wiggins, together with predictive approaches discussed by Peter Vuust and colleagues, helps explain what such stylistic stability provides. Familiar rhythmic, harmonic and phrase structures allow listeners continually to anticipate musical continuation, so the arrangement establishes a dependable perceptual environment precisely while the lyric makes its physical environment increasingly impossible.
A tide sails through trees while the bass walks; clouds rest in sand while the guitar keeps four; waves brush the sky while the drummer keeps time; the shoreline carries the lovers while the singer remains serenely behind the beat; islands begin roaming, and nobody in the orchestra considers this worth mentioning. This is the song’s great musical-semantic contradiction. Its sophistication becomes a kind of camouflage for impossibility. Musically, the world remains predictable while semantically it becomes impossible.
Work beginning with Marta Kutas and Steven Hillyard’s research on semantic incongruity, together with later research by Stefan Koelsch and colleagues into relationships among music, language and meaning, offers useful scientific context for thinking about simultaneous systems of expectation. No particular neural response should be assigned to these lyrics without experimental evidence. The more defensible point is that musical expectation and linguistic meaning arrive together here while giving radically different accounts of how stable the world is. The words say the laws are changing; the music says everything is fine. Because the music never panics, neither do we. The arrangement does not illustrate every impossible image with strange chords or exotic effects, because doing so would tell the listener that blooming water and roaming islands were aberrations. Instead, the orchestra refuses to be surprised.
The cover extends the same principle into vision. Its world remains recognizably coastal and almost photographically credible while its details quietly violate that credibility. Deep marine blue connects sky and water, cooler blues enter the dunes and distant landscape, and warm sand keeps the foreground recognizably terrestrial. The floating shells translate “wander off for brighter days” into physical departure, while the strange turtle impression gives “turtle sand” a visual existence without pretending to define the phrase. Most importantly, the related blues begin doing visually what the lyric does conceptually: sea, sky and land remain distinguishable while their separation becomes increasingly uncertain. The shore must remain visible for its failure as a permanent boundary to matter.
That is also why the title itself grows stranger as the song proceeds. By the Shore initially sounds like an uncomplicated statement of location, but a shore ordinarily tells us where something ends and something else begins, and this shore increasingly refuses any permanent assignment. The sea has entered the trees, clouds have entered the sand, waves have reached the sky, coral has become arboreal, islands have entered motion and daylight has entered rest. The lovers are not standing outside this transformed world observing it, either. “We follow” matters because the human beings have entered the new grammar. They are carried by the shoreline and follow where tides breathe. They no longer require the old geography to remain intact.
This is where the song’s surrealism becomes romantic rather than merely ingenious. The collapse of fixed boundaries is not experienced as loss; it creates passage. A world with fewer absolute divisions becomes a world through which the lovers can continue moving together. A shore was never a perfectly clean division between two worlds. It was always the place where they touched, exchanged material and continually redrew one another. “By the Shore” takes that ordinary instability to its imaginative conclusion. The tide sails through trees because water is no longer confined to water; clouds rest in sand because sky is no longer confined to sky; islands roam because land is no longer condemned to stillness; daylight rests because even light has acquired another way of being. Everything remains recognizable, everything remains itself, but nothing remains confined to itself.
Beneath it all, the band continues swinging with immaculate composure, as though perhaps this world was never impossible at all. Perhaps the song has not made the shore unreal. Perhaps it has merely taken seriously what a shore has always been: a place that cannot be permanently assigned to either of the worlds it divides because it is perpetually being made by both. Everything is where it should be — but by the end of “By the Shore,” even where no longer means what it did when the song began.
Selected Bibliography
Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. University of Michigan Press, 1969.
Coulson, Seana, and Todd Oakley. “Blending and Coded Meaning: Literal and Figurative Meaning in Cognitive Semantics.” Journal of Pragmatics 37, no. 10 (2005): 1510–1536. DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2004.09.010.
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. “Conceptual Integration Networks.” Cognitive Science 22, no. 2 (1998): 133–187. DOI: 10.1207/s15516709cog2202_1.
Huron, David. Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. MIT Press, 2006.
Koelsch, Stefan, Elisabeth Kasper, Daniela Sammler, Katrin Schulze, Thomas Gunter, and Angela D. Friederici. “Music, Language and Meaning: Brain Signatures of Semantic Processing.” Nature Neuroscience 7 (2004): 302–307. DOI: 10.1038/nn1197.
Kutas, Marta, and Steven A. Hillyard. “Reading Senseless Sentences: Brain Potentials Reflect Semantic Incongruity.” Science 207, no. 4427 (1980): 203–205. DOI: 10.1126/science.7350657.
Miall, David S., and Don Kuiken. “Foregrounding, Defamiliarization, and Affect: Response to Literary Stories.” Poetics 22, no. 5 (1994): 389–407. DOI: 10.1016/0304–422X(94)00011–5.
Pearce, Marcus T., and Geraint A. Wiggins. “Auditory Expectation: The Information Dynamics of Music Perception and Cognition.” Topics in Cognitive Science 4, no. 4 (2012): 625–652. DOI: 10.1111/j.1756–8765.2012.01214.x.
Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. University of Nebraska Press, 1965.
Vuust, Peter, Ole A. Heggli, Karl J. Friston, and Morten L. Kringelbach. “Music in the Brain.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 23 (2022): 287–305. DOI: 10.1038/s41583–022–00578–5.
