As to the sea itself, love it you cannot. Why should you? I will never believe again the sea was ever loved by anyone whose life was married to it. It is the creation of Omnipotence, which is not of humankind and understandable, and so the springs of its behavior are hidden.

Tomlinson’s speaker rejects the romantic habit of “loving” the sea, especially from the perspective of those whose working lives depend on it. The sea is framed not as a companionable landscape but as an impersonal, overwhelming power—“the creation of Omnipotence”—whose motives are opaque and whose behavior cannot be reliably read. The passage pushes back against sentimental maritime myth by emphasizing the gulf between human understanding and elemental nature. In doing so, it suggests that intimacy with the sea (through labor, danger, and loss) breeds not affection but wary respect, even estrangement: what cannot be understood or negotiated cannot be loved in any ordinary human sense.