A chicken announces that she is "ordinary," then tells a story that is anything but. Walking along a beach, she comes across a stranded whale and, for reasons she doesn't explain, starts confiding in him about her epilepsy and her chronic headaches. The whale doesn't listen. He turns green and throws up all over her. She swallows a little of it, and for several weeks she feels well. Later, back on the beach, the memory drifts toward her "like a strange, sweet perfume." The central idea seems to be that relief can arrive from an unglamorous, even disgusting source, and that an unwanted encounter can still leave something precious behind.
The poem gets its comedy from its flat, matter-of-fact voice. The chicken never seems surprised. The whale "wasn't in distress / Although he said he wasn't partial to sand," a line that undercuts itself, since a beached whale who merely dislikes sand is an absurd picture. The humour lies in how calmly everything is reported. Even the whale's rudeness is mild: "He seemed not to listen." The speaker's reaction is less hurt than curious, and that curiosity carries over into the word "curiously" when she notes that the swallowed vomit "kept me free / Of any physical maladies." The word "physical" matters. It quietly implies that other kinds of trouble remain, and "several weeks" admits that the relief didn't last. The poem doesn't promise a cure.
The title explains what the speaker has stumbled into. Ambergris is a substance linked to sperm whales and long valued in perfume-making, so the whale's sickness turns out to be something people prize. "Eggs" is the chicken's own offering, small, fragile and homely. The title sets two bodily products side by side, one from the tiny creature and one from the vast one. Read this way, the chicken's confession and the whale's vomit become an odd exchange: she gives away her troubles, and he, without meaning to, gives something back. The moment of apparent humiliation, "covered head to toe in the stuff," is also the moment of unexpected luck. The poem also plays on the phrase "touched by extraordinary circumstances." Since the speaker has just mentioned epilepsy and headaches, "touched" may also hint at the strangeness of living with a body that misbehaves, though that is an inference rather than something the poem states.
Formally, the poem is free verse. It has no rhyme scheme and no regular metre, and its short lines read like plain speech, each one adding a small fact. Because the lines are so bare, the few sound effects stand out. "Chanced" and "beached" nearly echo each other in the same line, as if the accident and the stranding were linked. "Beach," "beached," "breeze" and "sea" keep the setting in our ears through repeated b and s sounds. The rhythm changes at the end, when the speaker says she "sometimes" returns to the beach. The whale has gone back to sea "with the tide," and the poem's one simile arrives: the breeze carries the memory "like a strange, sweet perfume." Until then, the poem has used almost no figurative language, so this image feels earned. It also closes a loop. Something nauseating has become something fragrant, and the pairing "strange, sweet" admits that the memory is both odd and lovely, with neither cancelling the other.
The poem matters because it handles illness without solemnity and without a tidy moral. The chicken is not rescued, healed for good, or even listened to. Yet the encounter changes how she remembers the beach, and a place that might have been marked by embarrassment becomes one she wants to revisit. Humour here is a way of being honest: the speaker can mention her epilepsy and headaches because the story around them is so silly. The whale, who simply wants to get back to the water, never knows he has become a kind of medicine and a memory. The poem suggests that comfort often comes by accident, from someone who wasn't trying to give it.