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“Like an Heiress” Introduction
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"Like an Heiress" was first collected in Grace Nichols's 2020 book Passport to Here and There. In this uneasy poem, a speaker stands on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean and is amazed by its beauty—but also by the fistfuls of plastic trash the waves are throwing up on the beach. Nature, in this poem, is a source of wealth and wisdom, an inheritance that one generation passes to the next. Sadly, however, the poem shows that humanity doesn't seem to be treating this great gift with respect or care.
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“Like an Heiress” Summary
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Much like a rich heiress might feel compelled to gaze at her glittering jewelry, the poem's speaker feels compelled to gaze out at the Atlantic Ocean and reflect on her life. However, the beach is empty apart from garbage washing up against the seawall. Old tires, plastic bottles, and disposable cups get flung back at the shore (rightly, the speaker feels) by a moody ocean. All alone, with not even a seabird for company, the speaker stands under the fiery richness of the sun and looks out toward the horizon. Then, like a temporary visitor, she returns to the air-conditioned safety of her hotel room, where she worries about time running out for our doomed planet.
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“Like an Heiress” Themes
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Humanity's Destruction of Nature
"Like an Heiress" tells the story of the speaker's troubling visit to a polluted beach. Hoping to gain some beauty and perspective from an encounter with the vast Atlantic Ocean, the speaker instead finds herself all alone on a lifeless shore covered in garbage. This, the poem worries, is the direction the world seems to be headed in: human beings have made "our planet" increasingly filthy, and we're running out of time to solve the problems we've created.
When the speaker heads out to the beach, she's expecting to find something "eye-catching" there: she wants to gaze out at the Atlantic "like an heiress" gazing into her jewelry box, relishing something beautiful and rich. The glory of the ocean, she hopes, might help her reflect on her own "small days," putting her life into perspective.
Rather than impressing her with its grandeur and beauty, however, this beach only depresses the speaker. It's lonely and awash with old garbage. No one else is out there either, "not even [...] a seabird." The implication is that pollution has robbed this beach of its loveliness and its life. Human wastefulness has done terrible damage even to the vast and powerful sea. The ocean seems angry about it, too: the speaker imagines the "ocean's moodswings" as it flings the garbage in its waters right back at humanity.
The speaker retreats from this sad shoreline to the "air-conditioned coolness" and security of her "hotel room," where she ruminates on the quickening years and fate of our planet." This retreat and her sad reflections suggest that she feels frightened and discouraged by what she's seen on the beach. The natural world can and should be a source of wonder, but, polluted by humanity, feels increasingly lifeless and hostile. And as the years "quicken[]," going by faster and faster, she feels afraid that we're running out of time to change the "fate of our planet" to something less lifeless, ugly, and depressing.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-14
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Natural Beauty and Heritage
Gazing out at the Atlantic ocean, this poem’s speaker feels wealthy. The beauty of the sea strikes her as a glorious fortune: she feels “like an heiress” admiring her jewels as she looks at the glittering water. That central simile suggests that nature is a kind of inheritance, something deeply valuable and beautiful that gets passed from generation to generation.
A big part of what’s wonderful about the natural world, in the speaker’s view, is simply its beauty. The waves of the Atlantic, to the speaker’s eye, sparkle like the “eye-catching jewels” around a wealthy woman’s neck; the sun strikes the speaker as a “burning treasury,” a store of molten gold. These images present the natural world as a source of endless metaphorical wealth. The sparkling waves and beaming sun are as glorious, precious, and delicious to look at as gold and jewels.
Beyond its mere beauty, though, nature is valuable because of the way it connects people. In describing herself as an “heiress” (a woman who has inherited wealth) rejoicing in her riches as she admires the jewel-like ocean, the speaker suggests that nature is an inheritance, a kind of wealth that gets passed down from one generation to the next.
If that’s the case, the poem suggests, then every generation has a responsibility to protect the inheritance of nature—“our planet,” as the speaker pointedly puts it—for the next generation. Alas, the trash-strewn beach where the speaker stands suggests that humanity isn't doing a very good job protecting and preserving the wealth of nature for the people of the future.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-3
- Lines 9-14
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Like an Heiress”
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Lines 1-3
Like an heiress, ...
... oceanic small days.The poem begins with a vivid simile. The poem’s speaker stands by the shore of the Atlantic ocean and feels “like an heiress” who is magnetically “drawn” to gaze at her “eye-catching jewels”—perhaps, say, pausing by a gilded mirror to admire herself all decked out in a diamond necklace and emerald earrings. The imagined heiress’s “eye-catching jewels,” the simile suggests, are like the glitter of the Atlantic; the magnetic sight of the ocean makes the speaker feel rich.
What’s more, if the speaker is like an heiress (a woman who has inherited her wealth), she’s like a person whose riches have fallen into their lap—and in this case, a person who can’t believe her luck. The imagined heiress has to stop and marvel at the fabulous jewelry that has come to her without effort; likewise, the speaker has to stop and marvel at the glory of the sea, amazed that she gets to relish this sight.
This simile might hint that that the ocean is a kind of inheritance, something passed down from generation to generation. Everyone is an heiress or an heir of the sea: this is enduring wealth that all humanity gets to share in.
The ocean also offers the speaker a chance to reflect, as she points out in a metaphor: the Atlantic, to her, is a “mirror” as well as a jeweled legacy. Looking out to sea, she can see what she calls her “oceanic small days” reflected back at her. The paradoxical idea that the days of one’s life might be both “oceanic” and “small” points to the way the speaker finds meaning in the sea. Next to the ocean, anyone might feel small and mortal. But one might also feel connected to something eternal. If the speaker is an “heiress” of the ocean, then generations of people before her have gazed at the same sea with similar feelings. In feeling astonished and awestruck by the sea, grateful for its beauty and amazed at its scale, she’s participating in something “oceanic,” connected to something big and eternal precisely because she feels small and temporary.
These first lines, then, present a complicated picture of what the sea might have to offer to humanity. It’s gorgeous, magnetic, and compelling; it’s a reminder of how small human beings are as well as how lucky we are to get to live in a beautiful world. Alas, this poem will go on to suggest that the story of humanity’s relationship with the sea doesn’t end there. The speaker will soon realize that human beings have treated nature’s treasure chest as a garbage dump.
A hint to some of this poem’s themes might appear in its form. At first, readers might expect it to be a sonnet:
- Like a sonnet, the poem is written in a compact 14 lines, and at a glance, those lines all appear to be about the same length (as they would be in a sonnet, which is typically written in iambic pentameter—lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “Round man- | y west- | ern is- | lands have | I been”).
- But in fact, the poem uses free verse, without a rhyme scheme or regular meter.
An old form gets broken here, then. The poem at first looks like it belongs to a time-honored poetic tradition, but quickly proves this to be an illusion. Just the same thing will happen in the poem’s action. The speaker will first see something timeless and reliable in the sea, then realize that humanity has disrupted nature’s old rhythms.
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Lines 4-7
But the beach ...
... an ocean's moodswings.
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Lines 8-10
Undisturbed, not even ...
... gleam of Atlantic -
Lines 11-14
before heading back ...
... of our planet.
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“Like an Heiress” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Simile
The poem’s similes capture the speaker’s intense and complicated emotions about the scene before her. The first of these gives the poem its title:
Like an heiress, drawn to the light of her
eye-catching jewels, Atlantic draws me
to the mirror of my oceanic small days.Here, the speaker compares her desire to go and gaze at the Atlantic ocean to a wealthy heiress’s desire to gaze at her expensive, glittering jewelry. The idea of the speaker as an heiress in particular, not just any rich woman, is important: an heiress is a woman who has inherited her money. The simile suggests that the speaker likewise feels she has inherited the beauty of the Atlantic Ocean: its “eye-catching” glitter is also something that has been passed down to her. Perhaps the implication is that everyone inherits the metaphorical treasures of the ocean: nature’s beauty is a kind of wealth that belongs to everyone and that everyone is responsible for.
After her depressingly trash-strewn, bird-less visit to the beach, the speaker describes herself:
[…] heading back like a tourist
to the sanctuary of my hotеl roomIf the speaker is “like a tourist” here, she’s leaving the beach as if it’s a place she’s not really from—like somewhere that isn’t her home or her responsibility, in other words. The simile hints at the bigger problem of humanity’s destruction of nature: no one can really claim to be a tourist on "our planet," it’s everyone’s home. (This moment also relates to the story of the poem’s composition: Nichols wrote this autobiographical poem when she was on a visit to her native Guyana, a place she left as a child. To be “like a tourist” in your own home county might feel particularly poignant and alienating.)
Where simile appears in the poem:- Lines 1-3: “Like an heiress, drawn to the light of her / eye-catching jewels, Atlantic draws me / to the mirror of my oceanic small days.”
- Line 11: “before heading back like a tourist”
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Metaphor
Unlock all 295 words of this analysis of Metaphor in “Like an Heiress,” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.
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Enjambment
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Consonance
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Pun
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“Like an Heiress” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Heiress
- Seawall
- Sun's burning treasury
- Sanctuary
- Dwell
Heiress-
(Location in poem: Line 1: “Like an heiress”)
A woman who has inherited a lot of money. Here, the word helps to convey the value of nature: the speaker, looking out at the ocean, feels as though she has inherited great wealth.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Like an Heiress”
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Form
“Like an Heiress” plays with the traditional shape of a sonnet without ever quite becoming one. A reader who briefly glanced at the poem might easily mistake it for a sonnet because it takes the same sort of shape on the page: like a sonnet, the poem uses 14 lines of roughly the same length.
But the resemblance stops there. The poem doesn’t use a sonnet’s iambic pentameter (a line of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “When I | have fears | that I | may cease | to be”) or one of the traditional sonnet rhyme schemes. Instead, it uses unmetered and unrhymed free verse.
Nichols originally conceived of this poem in a longer, looser form. An earlier version of the poem, entitled “Except for the Lone Wave,” was spread out across 22 irregular lines. Nichols's choice to reshape the poem into this mock-sonnet thus feels meaningful. By raising traditional poetic expectations and then breaking them, the poem reflects its themes in its form. The speaker feels as if she’s looking out on something that has fallen out of its original pattern: the beautiful and timeless sea, which is now coughing up garbage at her feet.
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Meter
This poem is written in free verse, so it doesn’t use a regular meter. Nichols does, however, keep her lines at a roughly even length, making this 14-line poem look a lot like a sonnet at first glance. The poem’s rhythm thus feels stable, measured, and contemplative—at least in some ways. Surprising enjambments sometimes make this outwardly even-keeled poem feel a little unsettled. For instance, consider the first three lines:
Like an heiress, drawn to the light of her
eye-catching jewels, Atlantic draws me
to the mirror of my oceanic small days.This is all one long enjambed sentence—and the line breaks that split it into three parts don’t fall at spots where you’d naturally pause in everyday speech, creating little jolts of surprise. These pauses can help to highlight notable images and ideas: the imagined “eye-catching jewels,” for instance, feel particularly eye-catching because they get to start a line off.
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Rhyme Scheme
This free verse poem doesn’t use a rhyme scheme. Instead, it makes subtle music through assonance, consonance, and alliteration. Lines 8-9 offer a good example:
Undisturbed, not even by a seabird,
I stand under the sun' burning treasuryDensely-packed /b/, /d/, /ur/, /un/ and /s/ sounds here make this line feel quietly euphonious. The speaker’s sadness over the deserted, garbage-strewn beach comes through with stately dignity: the harmony of the language here helps to suggest solemn grief rather than rage or shock.
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“Like an Heiress” Speaker
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The poem’s speaker is a voice for Grace Nichols herself. Nichols wrote this poem while visiting her native Guyana, the country where she spent the first years of her life before her family emigrated to the UK. However, the poem doesn’t reveal more about its setting than the fact that the speaker stands on the shores of the Atlantic under a hot sun; this poem might take place in any place the Atlantic Ocean touches.
The poem’s speaker clearly feels surprised at finding this shoreline so polluted. The beach is strewn with garbage, there’s not even a single “seabird” there to keep her company, and she’s at last forced to retreat to her “air-conditioned” hotel room “like a tourist,” feeling alienated.
This speaker has a deep sense of the value and beauty of nature. To her, the Atlantic is at once a treasure-chest full of glittering jewels and a “mirror,” an invitation to contemplate her “oceanic” inner life and her place in the natural world. And the sun is a “treasury,” a storehouse of wealth. Humanity’s apparent unwillingness to treat these good things with the respect and care they deserve drives the speaker to gloomy reflections on the “fate of our planet”—a turn of phrase that reminds readers that this is everyone’s damaged planet, everyone’s responsibility.
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“Like an Heiress” Setting
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"Like an Heiress" is set on a polluted beach on the Atlantic Ocean. Though the poem doesn’t give any further specifics about where this beach might be, Grace Nichols has said that she wrote this poem after a visit to her native Guyana.
On some level, though, it hardly matters exactly where this beach is: the speaker is describing something that’s happening to beaches all over the world. The ocean the speaker observes here is beautiful and grand, able to remind her of just how small a part of the wide world she is. But it’s also choked with garbage and next to lifeless: "used car tyres, plastic bottles, [and] styrofoam cups” clutter the shoreline, and the speaker has “not even [] a seabird” for company. Human pollution has driven all life away from this place. The birds can't survive here, and the people (except for the speaker) don't want to be here.
This polluted shore ends up driving the speaker into “air-conditioned” hiding in a hotel room—and into big anxieties about the “quickening years and fate of our planet.” To see the glory of the sea made dirty and lifeless by human activity makes her feel small and frightened.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Like an Heiress”
Literary Context
The contemporary British-Guyanan poet Grace Nichols (1950-present) first published “Like an Heiress” in her 2020 collection Passport to Here and There. The poem has a longer history, however. The first version of this poem was a slightly longer work called “Except for the Lone Wave,” originally commissioned in 2015 by the UK’s RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce) for a project entitled 9 Original Poems on Climate Change.
Nichols was born in Guyana; her family moved to the UK when she was a young child. Caribbean culture, folklore, and oral traditions inform her work. Many of her poems (such as "Hurricane Hits England" and “Island Man”) explore the experiences of Caribbean immigrants living in the UK. When she moved to England in 1977, Nichols was part of a generation of West Indian poets whose work explored race, culture, and belonging at a time of intense xenophobia in the UK. Other poets of this movement include John Agard (to whom Nichols is married) and Linton Kwesi Johnson.
Besides Passport to Here and There, Nichols has published numerous well-known books, including the poetry collections I is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983), which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984). Her 1986 novel, Whole of a Morning Sky, explores Guyana’s struggle for independence from England. More recent books include Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009) and a variety of poetry collections for children.
Today, Nichols is recognized as a major English poet. When former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy created a poetry contest in UK schools, Nichols led the first panel of judges. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in the UK in 2007, and her work is taught in British schools as part of the English Literature IGCSE anthologies.
Historical Context
This poem explores the dismay and despair that many people feel in the face of rampant pollution and climate change in the 21st century. The speaker’s sense of fearful alarm at the sight of a lifeless, trash-strewn beach might feel familiar to contemporary readers facing the overwhelming effects of pollution on the environment; her pointed insistence that this is “our planet” we’re polluting makes it clear that this problem is one for all humanity to tackle together.
Nichols was inspired to write this poem when she visited Georgetown, the Guyanan city that she and her family left when she was a child. When she describes her speaker returning to the shelter of her hotel room “like a tourist,” she raises an idea only hinted at in the poem: the neither-here-nor-there displacement of being a visitor in your own native country.
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More “Like an Heiress” Resources
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External Resources
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A Short Biography — Learn more about Nichols's life and work.
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"Except for the Lone Wave" — Compare and contrast "Like an Heiress" with "Except for the Lone Wave": an earlier (and markedly different) version of this poem.
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Passport to Here and There — Read more about the 2020 book in which this poem was collected.
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An Interview with Nichols — Read an interview in which Nichols discusses her poetic process.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Grace Nichols
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