Almost nothing happens in "Sensations", and that is exactly the point. Someone sits down to waffles with golden syrup and pays attention to the experience. The central idea is that pleasure lives in the body, in the smell, taste and stickiness of a moment, and that an ordinary breakfast can reach for the biggest word available: "Heaven". The title's cheerful parenthetical, with its misspelling and exclamation mark, sounds like someone proudly signing their work. That fits the poem's lack of pretence.
The title is plural, and the poem delivers on it by moving through the senses one at a time. "Sweetness in the air" comes first, because smell reaches us before food does. "Golden" is the only purely visual word, a small flash of colour in the opening line. Then comes taste, with "the saltiness of butter / On my tongue", and finally touch, in the dripping "sticky". The poem eats its way inward, from the air around the speaker to the mouth and then to the whole experience.
The most interesting moment is the third line. "Rising above all else" sits between two lines and can attach to either. Read with what comes before, it describes the sweetness lifting into the air like steam. Read with what follows, it says the butter's saltiness is the sensation that stands out above everything. The line break lets both readings work at once, and that suits the food, since sweet and salty are tangled together on the plate. The matching "-ness" endings of "Sweetness" and "saltiness" set the two flavours side by side as equals. The poem is celebrating the contrast between them as much as the sugar.
There is no rhyme, and the poem doesn't need any. It is free verse in short lines, with the rhythm of someone thinking aloud, and the first seven lines run along in plain, unhurried speech. The tempo changes at "Joy as I bite into". The line ends on a preposition, leaving the reader suspended just as the speaker's teeth are about to meet the waffle. The object of the bite never arrives as a noun. We get a list of qualities instead:
sticky
sweet
sickly
syrup
Stacking one word per line slows the reading right down, so the syrup seems to drip down the page. The repeated *s* sounds, which echo "Sweetness" and "saltiness" earlier, add a soft hiss to the stretch. The words are also lowercase, unlike the capitalised lines around them, so they trail and spread rather than marching in line.
"Sickly" is the word that makes the poem more than a simple advertisement for breakfast. In a poem full of joy it is a negative word, a hint that this much sugar is almost too much. The speaker doesn't hide that or apologise for it. "Sickly" sits between "sweet" and "syrup" as just another part of the sensation, and the poem seems to say that the best pleasures often have a slightly excessive edge. Then comes the last line. "Heaven" stands alone, capitalised again after the lowercase run, like a lift after the drip. Sticky, sweet and sickly are all gathered into one word of approval.
Part of the poem's significance is that it takes a small, ordinary pleasure seriously. Poetry is often assumed to need grand subjects, but "Sensations" builds a miniature argument that attention is enough: look closely at what you are tasting and it becomes worth writing down. The poem is also honest in a way that makes it persuasive. It gives us the saltiness, the stickiness and the near-sickness, and it still lands on joy. Most readers have felt that mixture at a table, and the poem catches it in a handful of short lines.