‘To meet is to destroy,’ wrote Crabbe of the elements in collision, and it might stand as a summary of Peter Grimes. Both the Borough and Peter are caught in the ‘force, tumult and wrath’ in which ‘the river and the ocean met’: the ordered society and the disordered elements of the individual. The Borough seems to survive the threat that Peter posed. What really survives is only the non-human, the elemental. The passing bell is tugged by human hands to signify the end of human time for each of us, but the bell-buoy sounds for ever to the movement of the tides.