Comes back to sands
of a grey metallic soar
This clever couplet, which opens the third stanza, demonstrates Nichols’ ability as a poet to convey a complex idea through a single word. The first line, “comes back to sands” seems to continue the second stanza’s island imagery, which describes a seaside landscape with waves, fishermen, and birds. It even repeats the structure of the previous line, which says that “he always comes back” to the island. However, when the two lines are read together the word “sands” seems out of place—“sands / of a grey metallic soar” does not make literal sense. The poem’s focus on aural imagery hints towards the double function of the word “sands” within this set of lines. Read in this way, “sands” seems be a pun on the word sounds, which the stanza continues to describe: “sounds / of a grey metallic soar / to surge of wheels / to dull north circular roar.” This pun encapsulates the dissonance between locations (the imagined island and the real London) with which the man grapples, with sound as the medium for conveying this split. As Nichols explains in a BBC interview, the poem came out of her “laying in bed one morning and almost thinking that the sound of the traffic was the sound of the sea, the sound of the surf.” For a poem based on this idea of mishearing, it is very apt that a pun, itself based in a sort of mishearing, replaces “sands” for sounds.
Another London day
This last line of the poem comprises the entirety of the fifth stanza, breaking the rhythm of the previous multi-line stanzas. Another famous poem of Nichols’, “Praise Song for My Mother,” has a similar structure. In both cases, the last line being standalone adds a greater sense of poignancy and finality.
“Another London day” feels like a refrain, one that the man could say to himself every morning with resignation after getting out of bed and re-realizing that he lives in London instead of in the island scene he dreams of while half-awake. It expresses a sense of mundanity and monotony to which the man is resigned in his new home. It also echoes the common saying, “another day, another dollar,” an expression of resignation about the fact that one’s working days all feel the same. By specifying the place in this refrain, the man’s feelings toward London in particular—whose scene is “grey” rather than “blue” or “emerald” like the island—create this sense of resignation and monotony.
he always comes back groggily groggily
This is the final line of the third stanza, which signals the shift in setting and tone that follows in the fourth stanza. It emphasizes that the events of the poem happen on a regular basis: "he always comes back" to his imagined island scene. As morning traffic is commonplace along a busy London road, the man likely wakes up to the sound of cars streaming by every day and believes that it is the sound of the ocean. In this way, he revisits the island every morning upon awakening, and is able to access the comforting, familiar faraway place. "Groggily groggily" is set off via spacing from the rest of the stanza, which itself breaks visually from the rest of the poem. Additionally, the word "groggily" describes the man's internal state, not the island scene like the rest of the stanza. The gap between the two parts of this line could be seen to represent the gap between the imagined and real environments of the island man. Furthermore, "groggily" and its repetition lend a sleepy, dreamy feel to the confusion and mishearing of the poem.
