The poem opens with a puzzle: a bottle inside a ship inside a boat, each container tucked into the next like a set of nesting dolls. From there it slips into a string of questions and fragments, as if the speaker is imagining a festive scene piece by piece. There are flags, silk clothes, the "rich noise of fiddlers," and guests of rank, the town's jurates and a vice-admiral. The language feels like a party being set up in the mind.
Then the poem narrows. The grand gathering gives way to a quiet answer to "Where to drink?": in the lost ship, in bed, in the speaker's own cabin. The ship in the bottle becomes a private, imagined space, and the speaker says a "merry good night" to the bottle itself. The mood is playful and a little dreamy, with a hint of loneliness under the cheer. The speaker seems content to let a small object hold a whole world, and to end the evening alone with it.