The anchor heaves, the ship swings free,
The sails swell full. To sea, to sea!

These lines compress the charged instant of departure: the anchor is lifted, the vessel pivots with the tide or wind, and the sails fill—an image of release from constraint into motion and risk. In Beddoes’s characteristic Romantic-Gothic register, the exhilaration of “To sea, to sea!” can be read as a summons to escape stasis (social, emotional, even mortal) and to embrace the unknown. The sea functions as a traditional emblem of freedom and fate: once the ship is “swung free,” it is committed to forces larger than itself. The brisk, imperative rhythm reinforces the sense of irreversible momentum.