Half-asleep thoughts can run very large, and Pickering's poem begins by letting them. A speaker drifting off, with a move planned for "tomorrow," lets the mind wander to the grandest idea available: the love that keeps the heavens turning. Then the poem steps back into ordinary life, with a new flat, new furniture and, in the last line, new silverfish. The central idea is a gentle, comic one. Even if love moves the sun and stars, the people it moves are carried only from one cramped domestic address to the next, and the small annoyances of life move house with them, or are waiting at the other end.
The opening lines borrow their grandeur. "The love moving the sun / and the other stars" clearly echoes the closing line of Dante's *Divine Comedy*, which speaks of the love that moves the sun and the other stars. Pickering uses the thought in a quieter, more hesitant way. "Must be the love" is not a proclamation but a drowsy guess. "Mansions" is the other lofty word. Judging by the sound of it, it may recall the biblical "many mansions," though the poem doesn't say so. Either way, the stars are given new homes in a heavenly grand style, and this sets up the drop that follows.
That drop is built into the line breaks. The first lines are short, hushed and unpunctuated, so the sentence floats. "Near to sleep / is natural love" can be read as a statement of its own before "must be the love" turns it into something else, and that ambiguity suits a mind sliding between thoughts. Then comes "and ourselves, / tomorrow, to / a new flat." The sweep of "to their new mansions" is repeated in the pattern "to…", but the sentence lands on something small and ordinary. "Flat" also happens to mean level and dull, and the word deflates the sentence as it arrives.
The second stanza is quietly funny in its own way. "There there will be" is a plain statement about the future, but the doubled word also sounds like "there, there," the phrase used to soothe a child or a nervous adult. The speaker seems to be comforting themselves about the move. What follows is the comfort: "new friends and / new furniture." The repeated "new" works like a rhyme in a poem with none, and it ties together two things that don't belong together. Friends and furniture are listed side by side as if they were the same sort of acquisition. The ellipsis after "furniture" holds a breath, as if the speaker is about to add something warm or reassuring.
What arrives instead is "and new silverfish." The line stands alone, and it is a punchline, but a more thoughtful one than it first seems. Silverfish are small insects of damp corners and dark cupboards, so they are exactly what no one lists among the pleasures of a fresh start. Calling them "new" is the joke, because they will surely be the same as the old ones. The repeated "new" has been hopeful all along, and in the end it becomes ironic. There is possibly a further touch in "silver," a faint, tiny glitter that mocks the stars the poem began with, though that is an inference. The sounds also frame the poem: "sleep" and "sun" in the opening lines, and "silverfish" at the close, both with that soft hissing s. The poem travels from drowsiness to a creature that turns up in the dark.
The title, "Emigration," makes the joke larger. Emigration usually suggests a leap across oceans and a break with a whole life. Here it covers the stars' relocation and the speaker's move to a flat, and the poem implies that every kind of departure is partly the same. It is a hopeful lurch toward something new, with the old irritations still attached.
The poem is worth reading because it does so much in so few words. It has no rhyme and almost no punctuation, and it still builds a complete arc of rising feeling and sharp deflation. It makes its point about hope without sneering at it. The speaker's tenderness toward the stars and the move is real, and the silverfish do not cancel it; they just keep it honest. The poem suggests that this is how change actually feels, with a little cosmic wonder and a lot of boxes, and with something small and uninvited waiting in the new kitchen.