The Land of Counterpane

In addition to the speaker’s soldiers, ships serve as another vessel of the imagination. Readers can assume that the ships are also “toys” (Line 3) the speaker is animating with their creativity. The speaker “sent their ships in fleets” (Line 9) into the world they are building “[a]ll up and down among the sheets” (Line 10). When one considers a ship, they think of journeys and voyages. They think of sailing to unexplored worlds, to new lands just waiting to be discovered. Ships enable individuals to travel beyond the physical limitations of land, and to take advantage of the freedom traveling by water provides. Water flows and inspires sensations of movement as opposed to static stagnation. In a poem about the freedom provided by the imagination, the ship is symbolic of this freedom and of the imagination itself. The speaker’s imagination is able to carry them to new worlds and on new adventures. Moreover, water is symbolic of the unknown, of depths, and of the collective unconscious. The speaker’s ship, or imagination, floats across the unknown to experience whatever comes up through the imaginative depths.