Looking at it now it has “no meaning…but loss.” It doesn’t matter anymore because he lost it and he somehow regrets his later and present life as so far it has gotten nowhere - “Now it is rather to stand and say/ How many roads we take that leads to Nowhere.” He doesn’t seem to be happy with his life so far and could be trying to look for some sort of meaning and remember what it was like to be free and happy and to not worry about anything, which is why he talks of his childhood with such nostalgia.
Then the mood begins “Growing cold.” There is an impending danger and something bad is about to happen from this point - “waiting for the taniwha” [In Maori mythology, taniwha is a being that is found in deep parts of rivers, lakes or in the sea where the currents are dangerous.] The scene becomes eerie with the presence of “little spiders/ On driftwood so poisonous and quick.” And as the danger grows much closer, the mood gets more darker - “The carved cliffs and the great out crying surf/ With currents round the rocks and the birds rising.” The significance of “the birds rising” is to show how close this danger was to him. Birds are known to rise on such occasions.
His life is at a turmoil and a lot of bad things were happening to him at the time. He may have never realized it before, when they “raced boats” near the Maori ovens at those very carved cliffs, but thinking about it now has brought him there and to this realization - “The carved cliffs and the great out crying surf“. The cliffs were carved at the beginning with names and still carved at the end showing that the memories did not fade over the years, he just remembers more now and understands what he did not before when he was younger.
Time seems to be moving slowly as “A thousand times an hour is torn across/ And burned for the sake of living.” This last part of the line could suggest his unwillingness to live as he finds no meaning in his life anymore. He seems to have lost his identity and he goes back to this place, The Bay, to find it from step one when he was younger.
He is in a meditative state and transfixed to this point but he doesn’t seem to know why. “And stand stone still and cannot turn away., as though he were waiting for an answer to a question in his life, or figuring out where it went wrong in his life that he ended up “Nowhere”.
Baxter says, “The bay that never was.” It was a place that brought him happiness and he spent great moments here but all the while, underneath the surface, there were bad memories as well and moments of sadness. He suggests that happiness may not exist and has no meaning. The Bay was his escape when he was younger and as he grew older he begun to realize the many things that were wrong around him - “little spiders…so poisonous and quick”. From this point on, the poet suggests that his life had never been as happy or as fulfilled as it is “Not that veritable garden where everything comes easy”. Because he “now remembered…the bay that never was.”
