Theodore Enslin's poem moves through four short sections named after the movements of a Mozart work, and it behaves a little like music itself. The speaker begins with a plain idea: the means of the music are its meaning, and nobody should ask for more. Mozart's style is pictured as something carved deep into a whole century and absorbed into one man's blood.
The middle sections turn from argument to feeling. After four days of rain, the sun edges out, pollen drifts in damp air, and a narcissus appears in the dooryard. The mood is tentative, gentle, and quietly grateful. Then a fragment of a story ("There was a man who lived in our town") drifts in, as if a memory has surfaced.
In the final section, the speaker says the music acted as a cure. The darkness of G minor healed him the way "like cures like." The poem suggests that listening can restore a person, and that the music's meaning lies in what it does, not in what it says.