Tell me how many beads there are In a silver chain Of evening rain, Unravelled from the tumbling main...

The speaker poses an impossible counting task—“how many beads” in a “silver chain / Of evening rain”—to evoke the uncountable, fleeting nature of experience. Rain becomes jewelry only momentarily, “unravelled” from the “tumbling main” (the sea), suggesting a continuous, overwhelming source that breaks into innumerable transient drops. The question functions less as a request for information than as a poetic demonstration of limits: some things (beauty, sorrow, time, desire) resist measurement and rational accounting. The imagery is characteristically Beddoes-like in its sensuous precision and faintly ominous vastness, turning natural spectacle into a meditation on infinity and human inadequacy before it.