Pickering looks at the little winged faces that crowd the corners of an old map and treats them as a playful, slightly comic flock. The cherubs are the puffed-cheeked wind figures such maps often show, and the poem pictures their round, "podded" cheeks as if they were seed pods, soft and full. Their breath becomes "breathy shuttlecocks," as though they are batting puffs of air back and forth in a game.
The speaker seems amused and affectionate rather than solemn. The sounds help: the soft "p" and "b" of "podded," "prodding," and "baroquely" mimic puffing lips. In the last lines the cherubs fly "home to nest / in cartographic rafters," so the map turns into a kind of roof or loft, and the line "east to west" sweeps them across its whole width. The mood is light, whimsical and a little tender, treating a formal old object as something lively and alive.