ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Night falls, the rising tide washes the traveller’s footprints from the sand, and the next morning the world goes on as usual-but the traveller never reappears. The poem’s brief, eerie tale symbolizes the journey from life to death, perhaps indirectly reflecting on Longfellow’s own impending mortality.

Detailed explanation-2: -It is because he has died. Okay, so the speaker never says, “the traveler isn’t coming back because he’s dead, ” but all the images and word choice in the poem suggest that he has died. The tide falls (that fall here is a metaphor for death, as in “he fell in battle") and it’s twilight, which is the “death” of daytime.

Detailed explanation-3: -Symbolically speaking, the natural world takes over. It keeps going, while the traveler disappears. These lines in the poem’s final stanza are the speaker’s most direct statement about the permanence of nature and the shortness of human life.