Fear is an incredible emotion in that it has both emotional as well as physiological effects on the human body. In specific instances of extreme fear, the mind is able to function in a way that is detached and connected to the event simultaneously. In "Feared Drowned," Sharon Olds presents, in six brief stanzas, this type of instance. Olds thin use of language, loaded with metaphors, similes and dark imagery, disguises the horror experienced by the speaker. Sharon Olds closes the poem with a philosophical statement about life and the after-effects that these moments of horror can have on our lives and relationships.
             The setting of the poem is a day at the ocean with the family that gets terribly twisted. "Sharon Olds body of work is dominated by her relationships with her family" (Ames, An introduction to Sharon Olds).This could be considered an example of irony because one would normally view a day at the beach as a joyful and relaxed time. In "Feared Drowned," Olds paints a very different situation, using dark imagery to create the setting: "suit black as seaweed rocks sticks out near shore like heads." The poem expresses moments of intense fear, anxiety, and the element of an anticipated sense of doom. The poem opens with the narrator suspecting that her husband may have drowned. When Olds writes in her opening line: "Suddenly nobody knows where you are," this tells the reader that we are on the same page as the narrator as she makes this frightened discovery.
             A statement about Sharon Olds from the American Poetry Review expresses "For having written five hundred-plus poems which plumb the range of family dynamics and intimate physicality with a precision and metaphorical resourcefulness greater than may have ever before been applied to those subjects"(Hoagland, The Unarrestable Development of Sharon Olds). While fear plays a crucial role in the poem, Olds never mentions the emotion itself, except for in just the title. Inst...