MDDM Ch.30: "Sailor....Beware."

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Sunset at night-
Sailors delight

Sunset at morning-
Sailors take warning

Or so the old saying goes. I'm sure there are many variants. 

What strikes me as particularly "ironic" about the Flower of Luce,
though, is the similarity between the clientele of that cafe and the
description of those at the All Nations- almost as if the Flower were
a smaller version of the All, and while not as various, still
exhibiting a tendency toward the various. The Flower could be 
a nation within the All Nations, which, I guess, might make it
an ironic trope for America. 

However, It is the metonym within the final metaphor that I 
find the most "magnetic:"

"Then, Sailor among the iron isles,- Circumferentor Swab,- Beware."

Dixon becomes reduced to a swab, his ship a Circumferentor
("boxed" at that). I suppose I could prattle on about things
mythic and literary: Osiris, Adonis, Or, for the German 
enthusiasts- Kafka's "The Hunter Gracchus," and since 
"swab" is from the Dutch- The Flying Dutchman legend 
(particularly apt given it's source), all amusingly ironic- 
this is Dixon we're talking about- especially given Dixon's 
superior atitude toward the "butter bags." But what I hear 
most powerfully, perhaps because I'm a native English 
speaker, is not so much the irony but the cautionary note 
regarding the westward journey. That reminds me 
of the Rev'd John Donne:

LET man's soul be a sphere, and then, in this, 
Th' intelligence that moves, devotion is ; 
And as the other spheres, by being grown 
Subject to foreign motion, lose their own, 
And being by others hurried every day, 
Scarce in a year their natural form obey ; 
Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit 
For their first mover, and are whirl'd by it.
Hence is't, that I am carried towards the west,
This day, when my soul's form bends to the East.
There I should see a Sun by rising set...


http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/donne34.html