Everything in "Soirée" happens inside one sentence, and that sentence is a toast. It opens with "Let," the word of wishes and permissions, and what it asks permission for is a party, a gathering where things that don't belong together finally share a room. The guest list is odd. "Yes" and "never," "bear" and "bottle," "stone" and "noon" arrive in pairs, but none of the pairs is a tidy opposite. The natural answer to "yes" is "no," while "never" is a word about time, so the two aren't even speaking the same language. A bear is alive and a bottle is manufactured; a stone is matter and noon is a moment. Abstract meets concrete, wild meets made, heavy meets hour, much as a host might seat strangers side by side.
What holds each pair together is sound rather than sense. "Yes" and "never" share a short e, "bear" and "bottle" a hard b, and "stone" and "noon" their n's and rounded vowels. That is the logic of a real party, where people end up together because they happen to be standing near each other. The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter, only lines of six, seven and three syllables, then five, seven and five. Each stanza swells in the middle and then shortens, and the first shortens hardest. "Stone and noon" is two heavy beats with a small "and" between them, like a glass set down on a table.
The grammar builds suspense. The subject, "the meeting of yes and never," takes the whole first stanza to unfold, and the verb, "be merry," doesn't arrive until the second. The stanza break works like the pause before glasses are raised. Then the party tips over. The merriment comes "with wine" and also "wholly underwater," and the w's of "wine," "wholly" and "underwater" slosh together. Wine and water are another pair of unlikely companions, so the poem's own vocabulary starts doing what it asks of its guests. "Wine" also answers "bottle" from the first stanza, the contents catching up with the container. It's possible to hear "holy" inside "wholly," which would give the soaked party a faint air of ritual, though that is an inference, not something the poem insists on.
The last line carries the best joke. "Laughing at a bass" is funny partly because we're never told what is funny. The punchline stays offstage, like a joke you arrive too late to hear. The word also works twice. A bass is a fish, which suits an underwater scene, and the same spelling, pronounced differently, names the lowest register of music, which a soirée would certainly need. Judging by the imagery, the poem lets both meanings float. Add the bear, an animal known for catching fish, and the scene gets a gentle comic twist: the hunter and the usual prey are at the same table, and the bass is laughed at rather than eaten.
The central idea is that contradictions that look final in daylight, like "yes" against "never," can be loosened by play, drink and laughter rather than by argument. The "Let" matters here. The poem doesn't claim that these things meet. It wishes they would, which makes it a toast rather than a report and gives the cheerfulness a slight edge of longing. In twenty-four words it builds a small, complete world with its own rules and never stops to explain them. That is its value for a reader, since it shows that an image doesn't need to be decoded into one correct answer to work. You can take the party as imagination reconciling opposites, as drunkenness dissolving boundaries, or simply as a fine absurd scene, and the poem is happy with all three.