In a moonlit, music-filled setting of olive trees, coffee cups, and cobblestone streets, a speaker urges someone—perhaps an older, overthinking man—to stop sitting still and join a wild, sensual dance. Mandolins, silver limbs, grape clusters, and laughing women blend into a dreamlike invitation to surrender to rhythm and desire. Yet the speaker’s own tone is not purely joyful. The repeated image of rain falling on “the thin plates of my heart” grows heavier as the poem goes on, from a quiet “drop! drop!” to a loud, rigid beating. That contrast creates a mood of longing and frustration: while the scene promises freedom and pleasure, the speaker remains caught in an inner sorrow that the music cannot fully reach. The little ivory figures suggest people as delicate, beautiful, but controlled—pulled by strings of desire, music, or loneliness.
Little Ivory Figures Pulled with String — Summary
Is it the tinkling of mandolins which disturbs you ? Or the dropping of bitter-orange petals among the coffee-cups ? Or the slow creeping of the moonlight between the olive-trees ? Drop ! drop ! the rain Upon the thin plates of my heart.
String your blood to chord with this music, Stir your heels upon the cobbles to the rhythm of a dance-tune. They have slim thighs and arms of silver ; The moon washes away their garments ; They make a pattern of fleeing feet in the branch shadows. And the green grapes knotted about them Burst as they press against one another. The rain knocks upon the plates of my heart. They are crumpled with its beating.
Would you drink only from your brains, Old Man ? See, the moonlight has reached your knees. It falls upon your head in an accolade of silver. Rise up on the music. Fling against the moon-drifts in a whorl of young light bodies : Leaping grape-clusters. Vine leaves tearing from a grey wall. You shall run, laughing, in a braid of women. And weave flowers with the frosty spines of thorns. Why do you gaze into your glass. And jar the spoons with your finger-tapping ? The rain is rigid on the plates of my heart. The murmur of it is loud — loud.