Pickering packs a whole day into seventeen lines and lets it run down like an engine left to idle. It starts at noon with a rainbow and the aftermath of a storm, moves through an afternoon of tide and shingle, and ends after ten at night with a bug on a rock face and a boat knocking in the dark. Nothing dramatic happens, and the poem announces no lesson. Its central idea seems to be that energy doesn't vanish so much as shrink. The thunder that "gobbled" miles becomes the "plonking" of a skiff, and the poem asks us to listen closely enough to enjoy the small sound as much as the big one.
The title poses the first puzzle. It promises a motorbike and a return at dusk, yet no bike ever appears. One reading, and it is an inference from the wording, is that the bike has seeped into the vocabulary. The tide shows "taut handling" of the shore and is "scrubbing off old tread." The waves are a "grippy pack." The grass has "get up and go," the bug "idles," and the flower's tongue is "tweaked." Even the "mile-gobbling thunder" sounds like an engine. The landscape is described by someone who has just stopped riding and still thinks in grip, throttle and tyres. The return of the title is then a slowing of the speaker's own body, matched by the slowing of the day.
The poem's form does similar work. Most lines run to about ten syllables with a loose iambic pulse, but Pickering stretches the pattern when he wants speed. "is the get up and go of the grass, now standing proud" is crowded with small words and almost gallops, as if the grass were springing up as we read. The rhyme begins tidily with cloud/ran/proud/began, a closed quatrain. Then the order loosens. "Shore" finds no partner, and later rhymes arrive in staggered, overlapping groups: bay/day/away, then pack/black/back, with hope/slope threaded through. They never lock together neatly, which suits waves coming in out of step. Only at the end do two lines rhyme side by side, in stiff/skiff, and the couplet shuts the poem like a latch.
The most vivid writing comes from verbs, especially nouns forced to act as verbs. The rainbow "chinned the cloud," hauling itself up like a gymnast on a bar. A small cloud "crabs away," edging sideways. The waves become a hunting pack that "worries the soft stones," and the phrase "wave snaps the heels of wave" snaps itself, with its hard, repeated sounds. Compare this with the late-evening verbs: "drift," "idles," "grows." The language relaxes as the day does. Even the oxymoron "briskly idles" catches a creature that is busy and aimless at once.
The one death in the poem gets the harshest language. The "dead bell flower, its tung tweaked, wrung from hope, squeezed into rag" is handled like laundry, and its anthers peel back at the end of the sentence. "Tung" looks like a clipped spelling of "tongue," which gives the bell its clapper. It is a bell that cannot ring, set against the calls of crickets and the lilt of the waves. This is a rare moment of stillness amid all the sound, and it makes the nearby noises seem more alive.
The poem's significance lies in how it treats a familiar subject. Storm, rainbow, sea and nightfall are the stock material of nature poetry, and the usual treatment is hushed and grand. Pickering makes them muscular, mechanical and a little comic, and he lets the grandeur go out on an unglamorous "plonk." The poem also shows how much a title can change a text. Without "Motorbike," this is a seaside evening. With it, the whole scene reads as a rider's cooling-down, and the ending is a kind of switching off. The night grows "stiff," as an engine ticks and stiffens when it cools. For a student, it is a good example of how word choice alone can build a mood and carry a day from noise to quiet.