The poem opens with a toy: a wooden bird that tips forward again and again, as if it could run forever on its own reflection. That image sets up a mind stuck in a loop, imagining endless motion without cost. Then the speaker shifts to something real and strange: the sun glimpsed in a bog, bubbling and trilling like a toad. Nature feels alive and almost magical here.
The mood darkens when mercury enters. The alchemists once prized it, but now it is "nearly everywhere," slipping even into mother's milk and the legs of a heron. The speaker's tone turns half-celebratory, half-fatalistic: "Extract of death, let us dance." The wish for bones "honeycombed with light" sounds beautiful, but it also suggests brittleness and poisoning. The ending returns to the toy bird. We, too, are "bulbous" and caught in our rituals, bowing over and over. The poem leaves a quiet, uneasy feeling of complicity, with wonder and contamination tangled together.