Walking through a gallery, the speaker of "gallery" sees skies and ends up looking at their own life. The poem is built on a contrast between two kinds of picture. In the first half, skies are "portrayed in square." In the second, they are "pictured by hand." The poem never says outright what these two kinds are. Judging by the wording, the squares suggest framed, photograph-like images and the hand-made ones suggest drawing or painting, but that is an inference. What the poem is sure about is the effect. Looking at the squared skies leads to comparison, and looking at the handmade ones leads to understanding.
That shift is carried by two verbs: "i start to compare" becomes "i comprehend." Comparing is a cool, measuring activity, and the lines that follow it are weighed out like goods: "a dense love; a heavy loss." Both adjectives belong to the vocabulary of mass, so feeling is turned into something that can be set on scales. Even the clouds are sorted, "each different clouds; each different bounds." The grammar is slightly off, since "each" normally takes a singular noun, but the slip suits the line. The clouds seem to multiply before our eyes, and every one of them comes with its own limits.
The opening couplet sets the mood. "Another blue colored heart, / another gray colored sight" repeats "another" and the flat phrase "colored," so the emotions arrive like items on a conveyor belt. Blue stands for sadness and gray for dullness, but the phrasing treats them as paint labels, not as felt things. These two lines are also the only ones that don't rhyme: "heart" and "sight" just sit side by side. After this, the poem settles into tidy rhymes: square/compare, hand/comprehend, day/pay, forget/regret. "Clouds" and "bounds" are a slightly looser, near-rhyme pair. The neatness has a quiet irony. The chiming ends make the poem sound like a nursery rhyme, while the content is about burdens that don't resolve so easily.
The punctuation is worth noticing too. The semicolons after "love," "loss," "clouds," "bounds," "day" and "pay" set each phrase apart. None of them has a verb, so they read like captions on a gallery wall, short labels pinned beside each picture. This fits the title, which the poem puts in guillemets, as if it were itself the name of an exhibit. The speaker is not telling a story about what happened. They are hanging their memories up in frames, one phrase at a time.
The second half raises the stakes. "A breathless day" brings the body into the poem for the first time, and the hand-made image seems to knock the wind out of the speaker. What follows is a chain of increasingly heavy phrases: "a price to pay," "a crave to forget," "a massive regret." The poem has moved from "dense" and "heavy" to "massive," so the weight keeps growing. "Crave" is also an unusually physical word for forgetting, which we normally think of as passive. The speaker wants to forget the way someone wants food or air, and the final noun, "regret," shows that wanting is not being satisfied. The poem stops there, with no consoling turn.
The central idea, then, is that how a feeling is pictured changes how much it can hurt. The squared sky keeps us at a distance and invites comparison, while the sky made by a hand carries something personal and makes us understand, at a cost. One reading is that handmade images show the trace of a person, and so bring a person's grief into the room. That is only a reading, though, because the poem leaves the speaker's past unexplained.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth studying. In fourteen short lines with plain vocabulary, it shows that looking at art can quietly turn into remembering. It does this through structure, not explanation: a flat opening, a pivot on one word, and a run of weights that grows heavier line by line. The reader is never told what the regret is, only how much it weighs.