A question about love is put to a stranger, and the poem spends its remaining lines showing how badly words cope with it. Someone says, "Tell me, stranger, / what love should be called." The stranger's reply is enormous and useless: he "preached the whole book / then went into court." Then a drum passes, beating oddly, and the speaker, who has been silent until now, watches and says nothing. The central idea seems to be that love resists naming. The poem sets two kinds of answer side by side, one made of language and doctrine, the other of rhythm and silence, and it clearly prefers the second.
The wording of the question matters. The asker doesn't want to know what love *is*, only what it "should be called." That is a request for a name, a label, perhaps a ruling, and the word "should" gives it a faintly moral tone. The stranger answers in kind. "The whole book" is a telling phrase because of that "whole": he doesn't select or distil, he delivers everything. The poem never says which book, and the vagueness helps, since scripture, law and rulebook all fit. The next line confirms the drift. Preaching leads straight into court, as if explaining love and judging it were the same activity. The poem also mocks the stranger's thoroughness through its own economy. A whole sermon and a trial pass in two lines.
Then comes the drum, which has no drummer. It simply "came by," as though the rhythm were travelling on its own. The speaker calls the beat "a strange manner of beat," and the word echoes the opening address. "Stranger" and "strange" share a root, so the strangeness that began as a person's label has shifted into the sound. The preacher, who should have been the unfamiliar presence, turns out to be the conventional one, and the really foreign thing is the drum. Judging by the poem's logic, that unfamiliarity is the point: if love is strange, only something strange can speak for it.
The sound of the poem enacts this. There is no rhyme and no steady meter, just plain, mostly one-syllable words in short lines. The longest line belongs to the sermon, and it is a heavy, rounded one, full of long vowels ("the whole book"). The court line that follows is clipped and quick. The drum passage then slows everything down. The line break after "beating" leaves the beat hanging in the air, and "now and then a single stroke" has its stresses spaced far apart, so the line itself seems to pause between hits. A small word-play sits underneath. "Then" in "then went into court" belongs to the sermon's tidy sequence of events, while "now and then" describes the drum's irregular, unpredictable pulse. Orderly time belongs to the institutions, and occasional time belongs to the drum.
The speaker enters only in the last two lines: "I wondered at what I saw / but did not speak." The verb is "saw," oddly, for something that is beaten and heard, which makes the drum feel less like a noise than a vision or a passing procession. The "but" implies that speech was possible, even expected, and that the speaker chose not to join the stranger. Wonder replaces explanation. We can't tell whether the speaker is the original asker or an onlooker who overheard, and that ambiguity lets the reader step into the role. We too have asked the question and been given a sermon, a verdict and a drum.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in nine lines without becoming a lecture about the limits of lecturing. It has the shape of a parable or riddle, and like one it ends without a moral. It also doesn't simply dismiss the stranger, who is only answering in the wrong register. By ending on restraint, with a speaker who does not speak, the poem practises what it implies. Its final line is itself like the drum's single stroke, followed by silence.