It is not only of the breakers that the Poet has given us pictures. Along these sands it was his wont, no doubt, as it has often been that of the writer,
To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,
And tender curving lines of creamy spray,
and it is still Skegness and Mablethorpe which may have furnished him with his simile in “The Dream of Fair Women”:
So shape chased shape as swift as, when to land
Bluster the winds and tides the self-same way,
Crisp foam-flakes scud along the level sand,
Torn from the fringe of spray.
Walking along the shore as the tide goes out, you come constantly on creeks and pools left by the receding waves,
A still salt pool, lock’d in with bars of sand,
Left on the shore; that hears all night
The plunging seas draw backward from the land
Their moon-led waters white.[5]
or little dimpled hollows of brine, formed by the wind-swept water washing round some shell or stone:
As the sharp wind that ruffles all day long
A little bitter pool about a stone
On the bare coast.[6]
Many characteristics of Lincolnshire scenery and of Somersby in particular are introduced in “In Memoriam.”
In Canto LXXXIX. the poet speaks of the hills which shut in the Somersby Valley on the north: