Iris Murdoch’s Wild Imagination reassesses the sea and its eponymous material presence as the central component or hero of Murdoch’s novel in a chapter on The Sea, The Sea. Chapter 4 counters critical analysis of the novel that casts the sea as empty and its chief purpose to provide a psychological metaphor for the narrator’s inner life and chaotic relationships. Instead, I consider the presence—and the evidence of implied presence—of rich and abundant sea-life; the constancy of the sea’s tidal waters; and the manner in which Murdoch asserts the sea’s material presence in resistance to her narrator’s solipsistic and sovereign demands on those (both human and non-human) around him. With reference to the Romantic movement, as well as the blue ecology theory that forms part of contemporary ecocriticism, this chapter offers a comprehensive reading of the novel that foregrounds the vital littoral protagonist—the sea, taking the phenomenology of ocean for what it is, and beyond its presence in the novel as the amorphous by-product of its narrator’s turmoil.