Portrait d'une Femme Man and the Natural World Quotes

The fishing and sea imagery we see in earlier lines now transforms into furniture and decorative objects in a living room. We only ask if something will "fit a corner" or "show use" when we are trying to decorate an interior space, and adjectives like "tarnished" and "gaudy" refer to objects we might find on our grandmother's fireplace. The poem also moves us from thinking about natural to manmade objects – things found on a loom that require labor, or work, to produce.

"Idols and ambergris and rare inlays" has a nice, melodic ring to it, but it's also a deceptively complex list of objects. While all three probably refer to some kind of manmade object, they also powerfully invoke the natural and spiritual worlds. Idols are manmade representations of deities and spirits; ambergris, often used for perfume, is secreted from whale intestines; and shells, horn, or ivory are often used for decorative inlays. 

This poem is filled with vague words like "things," "stuff," and "strange," which actually help intertwine the two worlds of the Sargasso Sea and London. We get a lot of descriptive words that lead us toward the sea or the city, but the speaker never commits to saying, "This is happening in the sea, this is happening in the city." We're left in a hazy, in-between space. In these lines, words like "deciduous" and "sodden" make us feel like we're wading through seaweed in the middle of the ocean, but then the phrase "new brighter stuff" brings us back to the idols, rare inlays, and living room decorations of earlier lines.