France is a librarian and college counselor, who teaches history at University Liggett School and English at Macomb College near Detroit, Michigan. In the following essay, France analyzes the prophetic nature of the poem from both a biographical and a textual perspective.

In "What My Child Learns of the Sea," Lorde employs both cyclical and linear imagery to explore the mysteries of human identity from a female perspective. Seasons and weather come in recurrent cycles, while daughters, like sons, typically proceed along a trajectory that takes them from the ignorance and innocence of infancy—via a path of learned experience—toward an awareness of mortality and, finally, to death. All girls and women are daughters, but not all daughters become mothers. In this poem, the speaker is evidently a mother contemplating the changes that will occur in her daughter's awareness and perspective as she grows up.

If...