Meaning & Analysis
Following a period of high tide (flood), there will be a low tide (ebb), and vice versa; the sea’s movements are cyclical and alternating.
Insights
Cycles of Fortune
The proverb metaphorically expresses that prosperity and adversity naturally alternate; no condition—good or bad—is permanent, and change is inevitable.
Transience of Circumstance
It serves as a reminder that both happiness and hardship are temporary, encouraging perspective and resilience through changing fortunes.
Historical Symbolism
The tide’s regular ebb and flow have long symbolized the unpredictability and rhythm of human life, echoed in ancient, medieval, and early modern wisdom as a way to explain fate, luck, or the caprices of fortune.
Cultural Resonance
Appearing in literature and folk sayings across cultures, this proverb reassures the anxious and tempers the triumphant, sustaining hope in bad times and humility in good ones. The cyclical view of existence is central to Stoic, Christian, and Eastern philosophies.
Psychological Dimensions
By linking personal fortunes to natural cycles, the proverb encourages acceptance, patience, and emotional equilibrium, making it a source of comfort in distress and caution during success.
Rhetorical Devices
Antithesis
The proverb’s balanced contrast between 'flood' and 'ebb' dramatizes the inevitability of reversal, creating a memorable rhetorical pattern.
Parallelism
The repeated, mirrored structure mirrors the cyclical nature of tides, reinforcing the lesson through form as well as content.
Metaphor
Uses the tangible imagery of the sea to encapsulate abstract ideas about change, fate, and impermanence.
Transcription
Quotations
After a lowe ebbe commeth a floude.
The sea being at full tide, ebbeth.
Euerie tide [hath] his eb.
A flow will have an ebbe.
If poore thou art, yet patient bide, For after ebbe may come a tide.
A flow will have an ebb.
Every Flow hath its Ebb.
Cross References
Annotations
- There is a time when Families, and single Persons thrive, and there is a time when they go backward.
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.