"Semi-Detached Suburban Mr. James"

A couple days ago, I ran across my note on "Semi-Detached Suburban Mr. James" that I wrote about in this post about a year ago:  there's a contrast between the fixedness of "Hanging things upon the line" and the movement of "your life slip[ping] away."  I added the concession that "one is literal, and the other is metaphorical," but I realized recently that in a way, this difference between the tangible and intangible actually matches the contrast between being static and passing away.