Summary
In the third stanza, the speaker departs from realtime descriptions and moves into the territory of the imagination. Now, the speaker imagines what the residents do when they enter their houses. The speaker describes their movements as soft and slow, "touched by that everlasting gold." The speaker says that when they go back into their homes, they make themselves tea. The speaker describes the tea by describing what it is not, which is cheap. The description of the tea in terms of its opposite leads the reader to conclude that Beverly residents drink only the finest of teas.
Analysis
In the speaker's eyes, the life led by residents of Beverly takes on a luxurious, almost liquid quality. They don't simply walk, they flow. Their movements are "touched by that everlasting gold," meaning that their wealth is evident in ways they can't even control. They wear their wealth on their sleeves; it's telegraphed in their gait, in the way they walk through their front doors and survey their front lawns.
The speaker describes the tea they make in Beverly in terms of what it isn't. Tea, for Beverly residents, "does not mean / They will throw some little black dots into some water and add sugar and the juice of the cheapest lemons that are sold." This tells the reader how tea is made in the speaker's house, and by extension how tea is experienced for working-class people. There is a casualness and cheapness about the tea that the speaker describes; it is modest tea, using the affordable, available resources. It implies that tea for Beverly residents, by contrast, involves fine ingredients, expensive citrus, and choice teas. This stanza begins a more overt comparison between Beverly Hills and Bronzeville, or more generally, working-class neighborhoods in the U.S.
