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Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;
Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.
She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.
Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.
Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.
Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.
The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair,
Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.
An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.
The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray.
EXPLANATION WITH CRITICAL ANALYSIS
Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shoreTwenty-eight young men and all so friendly;Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome
These lines suggest that the twenty-eight bathers are enjoying endlessly in the company of one and then. They are swimming together and are lost in their own World not bothered about the society. It also shows that the poet while writing this, was might of twenty-eight years of age.
SUMMARY AND CRITICAL APPRECIATION
In this section, the “self” of the poet identifies with the lonely sex starved young woman who is twenty-eight years of age. The young woman with craving eyes watches twenty-eight young men bathing in a carefree manner. She, with roving eyes, observes them, unobserved. She is a solitary figure residing on the banks of the river. She muses that any one of those twenty-eight men, though plain looking, would satisfy her. As she watches them, she lets herself joins the bathers in the realm of her imagination. She bathes with them, and swims with them. In a sensuous manner, the poet describes that her:
Unseen hands also pass'd over their bodies,It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.
The twenty-eight bathers are in their own world, swimming, not bothered about the unseen twenty-ninth swimmer.
Symbolically the poet may be placing his loneliness and longing for companionship in projecting the solitary figure of the lady. It also shows that the poet might have been twenty-eight years of age when he wrote this section. It shows that a human being can never exist alone. He has to have company to survive in the society. The number twenty-eight has been interpreted by O.K. Nambiar to stand for human imperfections. The woman or the twenty-ninth number stands for the soul which Man in his imperfection is unable to recognize. The sea symbolizes the world of phenomena with its cycle of birth and death.