Dancing, in this poem, is something done to the speaker rather than something the speaker does. The wind is "taking control," "making me sway and bend," and obeying its "silent command." The music fills a mind that has no say in the matter. Only in the seventh stanza does "I" become the subject of a verb, and by then the verbs are "blink," "sinking" and "turn": the dance is over. This gives the poem its central idea. Ecstatic escape feels like freedom, but it is borrowed, and when it ends it can leave a person lonelier than before.
The early stanzas work by piling sense on sense. The wind is touch, the music is sound, and lavender and rosemary supply smell, though the poem says they "put on a display," a visual phrase for a scent. The senses blur together, which is the intoxication the poem names. Even at the high point, though, small warnings creep in. The music has "beautiful harmony" but also "harsh demands," so the pleasure carries pressure. The pronoun "our" appears just once, in "intoxicating our senses," as a moment of togetherness. Then the poem pulls back to "Around me, / Others pay no attention, / Caught in their own dances." The plural "dances" matters here. Everyone is lost in a private world, and the crowd is a set of separate people sharing a space.
The sixth stanza holds the poem's most revealing word. The "waving figures" are "trapped in joy and delight." Joy is not usually something one is trapped in, and the choice suggests the happiness is compulsive or temporary. The line before it points the same way: "Images and flashbacks, / Broken ties, / Are long gone tonight." Painful memories are not healed, only absent, and "tonight" puts a time limit on that absence. Judging by this, the dance works as a way of not thinking. "Waving" also hints at farewell, which suits a poem that ends in abandonment and sits under a byline that is itself a goodbye phrase.
The structure carries the same movement. The poem is free verse with short, soft lines that sound like swaying, and it runs through seven tercets with a steady rhythm. There is no regular rhyme scheme, but sounds echo and make connections. "Bend" and "command" share an ending in the first stanza. "Tonight" and "delight" chime across two stanzas, joining the absence of pain to the false-seeming joy. Near the close, "around" and "ground" finally rhyme, and the second one lands like a body hitting the floor. The shape changes too. After seven stanzas of three lines, the poem shrinks into two couplets, as if it were sinking to its knees along with the speaker.
The eighth stanza is the strangest: "This empty landscape, / A hollow hole." It has no verb and no action, only description, and the phrase "hollow hole" says the same thing twice, as though the language had been emptied out. The open "o" sounds are hollow in the mouth. Whether the repetition is deliberate or accidental, it fits the feeling of looking around after the spell breaks and finding nothing to name.
The closing metaphor, "The circus has left me," carries much of the poem's weight. A circus is spectacle, noise, colour and performance, and it is also something that packs up and moves on. Calling the dance a circus recasts everything before it: the swaying figures become a show, and the wind and music become part of the act. The phrasing keeps the speaker passive to the end. The speaker does not leave the circus; the circus leaves the speaker, "alone on the ground," like a patch of grass where the tents have been.
The poem's significance lies in this honest picture of the comedown. It does not condemn the dance or pretend the joy was fake, and it spends most of its length making the pleasure vivid. It simply follows the feeling to its end. The setting is never specified, so readers can take it as a party, a festival, or any kind of escape, and that openness lets the poem speak to many experiences. Its plain language and the clear shrinking of its form make it easy to read and hard to forget, because the last image stays with the reader after the music has stopped.