Nobody in "To Jeffie" apologises for the cockroaches. They arrive in the second line and stay, and the poem treats them as just another feature of a place the speaker loves. What looks at first like a thank-you note to a friend with a chaotic house becomes a small argument about hospitality: real welcome has little to do with tidiness. It is a matter of presence, of someone calm enough to let tired people land.
The opening address matters. "Jeffie with your house full of / cockroaches" is how you might greet a friend with a teasing, affectionate shout. The line break does the comic work, holding the word "cockroaches" back until the next line, so it lands like a punchline. The next line adds heat: the house is an "oven" by the sea. It is stuffy and sweltering, yet the speaker's tone stays warm, and that gap between discomfort and affection drives the whole poem.
The middle section moves in a rush. "We came - we came" repeats itself, with a dash in the middle like a gasp, and the short, broken lines ("ready for / refreshment", "in a rush off the / highway") mimic people tumbling out of a car. Against this the poem sets Jeffie, who "calmly and pregnantly" cooks artichokes. The pairing of adverbs is odd and wonderful. "Calmly" is an ordinary way to do something, but "pregnantly" turns a condition into a manner, so that pregnancy becomes a way of being in the room: weighty, unhurried, self-possessed. The "oven" two lines earlier may quietly echo it. That is my reading rather than something the poem states, but the kitchen is clearly a place where things are being made. Artichokes, too, are food eaten slowly, leaf by leaf, which suits the stillness Jeffie gives off while everyone else is in a hurry.
The details of the house are some of the best writing here. The "creakings" turn a sound into a plural noun, as though the house has a voice and a whole vocabulary. Then comes the line that dissolves the wall between inside and outside: "mussles and sandcrabs on the / beach and in your drawers". The beach has invaded the furniture. The spelling "mussles" is as printed in the text, and it gives the line a slightly unpolished, jotted-down feel. "Drawers" may also hint at clothing, which would add a trace of mischief, though the poem never insists on it. Either way, sea creatures and cockroaches together make a household where nature is not kept at the door, and the poem finds this appealing rather than disgusting.
After all that bustle, the ending slows down. "Then we all lay down together" is made of plain, short words, and the pace drops as the bodies do. The final image is "Underneath the night sea wind / That played across our tired bodies / Like spanish moss." Three nouns pile up in "night sea wind", so the phrase feels as heavy and soft as the air it describes. The simile is clever because moss hangs and drapes, while wind moves. By comparing the wind to moss, the poem makes the breeze feel like a thing with texture, something that settles on skin like a light covering. Spanish moss also suggests a warm, humid landscape, though the poem does not name a place, so that is an inference from the image alone.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no steady metre. Its music comes from repetition, from irregular line lengths that follow breath and action, and from the sweep of one long movement from arrival to rest. We never learn who "we" are or why they were rushing, and that leaves the poem feeling like an inside moment shared with the reader rather than explained to us.
Its significance lies in this unforced generosity. The poem declines to dress up its subject. It lets cockroaches, sandcrabs and creaking boards stand beside artichokes and a calm cook, and it concludes that this is exactly where rest becomes possible. A house does not have to be clean to be a refuge. It needs someone like Jeffie in it.