This is a short song in Ives' slow, visionary mode. It starts and ends with the gentle dissonance of a chord with an added sixth, but wanders dreamily and prettily though not outrageously through strange chords and modulations.

The text of the poem is from Robert Underwood Johnson's volume Poems, which Ives used for four pieces in the collection he called 114 Songs. It seems to be a song in search of a distant horizon, though at the end the rather commonplace object of the poem turns out to be "the point of yon horizon line nearest the dear one on a foreign shore."

The song, therefore, is an interesting mixture of Ives' tendencies toward both sentimentality and infinity, with the former prevailing.

In 114 Songs, "At Sea" is dated 1921, but the music goes back to Ives' Set No. 3 for Small Orchestra, Kv 40, where its music is found as the first movement, "Adagio sostenuto 'At Sea.'" The date of this short orchestral movement is uncertain and is often given as either 1902 or 1912.

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