Mermaids
Half in one world, half in another: the mermaid is every divided self.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about mermaids: symbolism, imagery, craft techniques and mistakes to avoid, plus exercises, prompts and a quiz in this free Writory guide.
What this theme is
A mermaid is a border creature, and mermaid poems are border poems. She belongs fully to neither sea nor shore, which makes her the natural emblem of anyone caught between two worlds: two countries, two languages, two families, two versions of a life. When you write a mermaid you are writing the ache of the threshold, the place where you can see both sides and settle in neither.
The theme also carries a darker inheritance about voice and cost. In the old tales the mermaid trades her singing for legs, her element for love, and the bargain is never fair. That exchange, what a person gives up to be allowed onto someone else's land, is the beating heart of the theme. The tail and the shells are decoration; the price is the poem.
Why poets return to it
Poets return to mermaids because the figure holds longing and danger in one body. She lures sailors and she is lured herself; she is predator in one tradition and casualty in another. That doubleness gives a poem instant tension. The theme also welcomes poets writing about migration, gender, disability and belonging, anyone who has been asked to change their body or silence their voice as the ticket of entry.
Where it comes from
The lineage runs from Homer's sirens, whose song promised knowledge and delivered shipwreck, through the medieval melusine legends, to Hans Christian Andersen's 1837 tale of a mermaid who trades her voice for legs and feels every step as knives. Tennyson wrote a paired Mermaid and Merman singing gleefully of their kingdom under the sea, while Matthew Arnold's The Forsaken Merman gave the abandonment story a heartbroken male voice calling a human wife back into the water.
T. S. Eliot supplied the theme's most quietly devastating turn in 1915, when Prufrock hears the mermaids singing and concludes they will not sing to him. The modern mermaid poem often lives right there: not in the wonder, but in the exclusion.
The elements that carry it
- The shoreline and tide line, the negotiable border where the two worlds trade salvage and wreckage.
- Voice and its loss: song, silence, a throat full of seawater, the traded tongue.
- Mirrors and combs, the old iconography of vanity that a modern poem can question or reclaim.
- Bioluminescence, kelp, pearls, wrecks: an underwater image bank far richer than generic sparkle.
- Water sounds on the line itself, long vowels for swell and drift, choppy consonants for surf and struggle.
Techniques that work
- Decide which direction the longing runs, sea toward land or land toward sea, and build every image along that current.
- Write the bargain, not the costume: show what your mermaid paid and what she got, and the poem will find its stakes.
- Use the mermaid as a persona for a real divided life, an emigrant, a bilingual child, a body in transition, and keep the sea literal at the same time.
- Let the sound design do half the work: enjambment can pull lines forward like undertow, and a heavy end-stop can beach a stanza.
- Try the untold perspective: the sailor's widow, the sister who stayed underwater, the fisherman who threw her back.
Mistakes to avoid
- Decorative mermaids: glitter, seashell accessories, no stakes. Fix: name what this particular mermaid stands to lose.
- Recycling Andersen's plot unchanged. If you retell it, change the bargain, the ending or the voice, or the original outsings you.
- Making the sea vague. Actual marine detail, cold currents, herring shoals, diesel slicks, beats an endless shimmering blue.
- Forgetting the danger. A mermaid defanged into pure whimsy loses the siren half of her inheritance, and the poem loses its edge.
An exercise
List three things you have given up, an accent, a home, a habit, a name, to belong somewhere new. Choose one and write a poem in which a mermaid makes the same trade, letting your real loss set the price of hers.
A challenge
Write two poems about the same mermaid a decade apart: one in the first month on land, one ten years later when the sea is mostly memory. Let the imagery age with her.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem in which a mermaid returns to the sea after years on land and finds she no longer swims the way she used to, and the water notices.
Before you submit
- The poem makes clear what the mermaid gains and what she pays.
- At least three images come from a real, physical sea.
- Voice, singing, silence or speech, does meaningful work in the poem.
- The mermaid retains some danger or agency; she is not merely ornamental.
- The ending settles on one side of the shoreline, or deliberately refuses to.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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