Eight short lines, and a whole argument about free will is tucked into the first one. "The good foot is put" does not say that someone puts it. The passive voice quietly removes the person doing the acting, so before the speaker has said "I," the body is already being handled. The phrase also echoes the idiom of putting your best foot forward, which usually suggests effort and self-presentation. Here the foot is simply placed, like a piece on a board.
What follows is tender. The foot goes "into a suspense of joy: / out and up." The word "suspense" does double work. The foot hangs in mid-air, held by a string, and that hanging is also a thrill of waiting, the instant before the step lands. The colon and the clipped "out and up" imitate the motion, two quick directions in open, buoyant vowels. At this point joy is physical, something the leg feels before the mind has a name for it.
Then the poem turns on itself. "Am I" is stranded at the end of a line, the first "I" in the poem, and it arrives as a doubt. The word "lunk" is blunt and slangy, a word for a dull, clumsy person. It also sounds like a piece of wood, which suits a puppet. The speaker insults himself before anyone else can, and the lofty "suspense of joy" gives way to a lumpish, everyday voice. The next phrase, "my life as a puppet / is pleasant," lets the line break isolate the small word "pleasant." That is a long way down from joy. Perhaps the speaker is admitting the pleasure is modest, or perhaps he is already embarrassed by it. The repeated p of "put," "puppet" and "pleasant" gives the middle of the poem a faint popping, wooden tap.
The last two lines pull back the curtain: "among mere sticks / knocking the strings?" Whoever is working the strings is not a grand master. We get only "mere sticks," which suggests the crossbars of a marionette's control, though the poem never says so. The grammar is slippery. The sticks may be what knocks the strings, or the puppet's life may be lived among them. Either way the controlling force has no face, and "knocking" suggests clumsy bumping and tangling rather than graceful manipulation. It is also a sound word. Listen to the hard k's that pile up near the end: "lunk," "think," "sticks," "knocking." After the soft opening, the poem itself begins to clatter. The knocking of strings may even faintly suggest a strange kind of music, though that is my inference rather than something the text states.
The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme and no regular beat. Its lines run from about three to seven syllables, and the enjambment ("Am I / a lunk to think") makes the reader pause in slightly awkward places, like a step that hesitates. The title adds another layer. "Strung along" is an idiom for being led on with false promises, and here it is also literally true of a puppet. The title therefore hints that the joy may be a deception, but the poem never decides.
That refusal to decide is what makes it worth reading. The image of life as a puppet show is old, and it usually leads to either rebellion or despair. This poem takes a more awkward and honest route: the speaker enjoys being moved, then wonders whether the enjoyment is foolish. The deflating phrase "mere sticks" makes the forces behind us look small and bumbling. That is humiliating, but also oddly comforting. The poem ends on a question mark, and the lifted foot has already happened regardless. The question is whether a pleasure counts for less because we suspect it isn't wholly ours, and the poem leaves us to answer it.