For the first few lines, we can't be sure who the Goddess is. She arrives as "a splendid foxy blur," and the grand announcement, "All hail! Hail my new perfume!", sounds like a deity's entrance. Then the family answers, "Yuck! What did she roll in?", and a few lines later "Get away, dog!" settles it. The Goddess is a dog who has rolled in something dead on the beach, and the poem is the comedy of her magnificent self-image colliding with the family's noses. Its central idea is that the same event looks completely different from inside and outside. She is bestowing a gift. They are enduring a stench.
Carter writes the poem as a short play, and that choice does most of the work. Capitalised names, stage directions and the closing "CURTAIN" give the picnic the air of a theatre piece. The directions also do something a plain narrative couldn't. They let us see the dog's behaviour from outside, with deadpan precision: "YOUNGEST throws sticks offstage. GODDESS pursues." The hinge of the joke is that the dog's lines are spoken aloud on stage, even though the family could only hear barking.
The poem has no rhyme and no steady metre, and its lines break in awkward places: "Enter, / stage left," or "powerful and / unique scent." That breathless enjambment suits a scene that rushes in. Still, the Goddess's speech drifts toward a more formal rhythm. "Subdued before my majesty" falls into a fairly regular, stately beat, and her vocabulary is all ceremony: "radiance," "portent," "majesty," "followers." The family speaks in short, flat, modern bursts: "Ugh!", "No way," "rank dog." The Youngest's doubled "You reek! You reek!" sounds like a child's outraged repetition. The gap between the two registers is the engine of the humour, as in a mock-heroic poem where epic language is attached to something trivial.
The most interesting thing is that the two sides never really talk to each other. The Goddess addresses her worshippers, and the family discusses her in the third person ("What did she roll in?", "She won't dry with the salt water"). Their practical worries about the long drive, the itching salt and the car smelling "like rotten–" are cut off by a dash, as if even finishing the thought is unpleasant. Against this, the Goddess keeps misreading them. When the family "stands, meek," she hears surrender: "Subdued before my majesty, / my followers, at last, bow before me." They are really defeated by a smell, not awed. Her divinity also has limits that the stage directions expose. When sticks fly offstage, the Goddess "pursues," because instinct outranks godhood.
The ending delivers the final deflation. The offstage call, "Come on, Butterscotch!", gives the Goddess her real name, and it is cosy and sugary, about as far from "majesty" as a name can get. She exits "barking," the only moment where the poem lets her speak in her own voice. Yet the call also carries the poem's warmth. Earlier the Youngest insisted, "We can't leave her!", and the family's retreat from the beach never becomes abandonment. Even the Mother's "Yes. I'm sorry" reads as a surrender to the daughter's argument that sits oddly beside the child's loyalty. In the end the family does take her home, smell and all. The dog's delusion turns out to be partly right, since she is the centre of the household and everyone does end up following her wishes, even if worship is the wrong word for it.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. It borrows a dramatic form to give an animal a point of view, and it makes us laugh at the dog while liking her. It also suggests that self-importance can be harmless and even lovable when the people around us look past it. The dog's perfume is revolting, but the poem's final feeling is affection.