Six short lines, one sentence, one question mark, and no answer. "Enigma" is a riddle that leaves the solving to the reader. The question sounds simple: what kind of thing is a city? But the two options it offers pull in opposite directions. Either the city is an object, "one house, a chest / of drawers," or it is a presence with a voice, "a singing master, / singing to the office / and the home." Furniture or music. Something you store your life in, or something that sings to you.
The first option is built with care. "Thing" is about the blankest noun in English, and the dash after it works like a pause while the speaker hunts for something more specific. What turns up is small and domestic: a house, then a chest of drawers. The idea is oddly convincing. A city really is a stack of compartments, with flats, offices and rooms, each holding its own contents and closed off from its neighbours. The lines shrink to match. They run six syllables, then four, then just "of drawers," two or three, as if the city were being folded down drawer by drawer until it fits in a bedroom. The line break adds something too. "A chest" sits alone at the end of its line before "of drawers" arrives, and for that instant the word means the part of the body that holds the breath. It is a small ambush, and it prepares the second half, where breath becomes song.
Then "or" turns the poem, and the lines swell back to six syllables twice running. Apart from "is," the first half has no action at all. The second half has "singing" twice, and the repetition in "singing master, / singing to" sounds like a teacher giving a note and a pupil echoing it back. The word was already hiding in the opening. The -ing ending rings through the poem (thing, singing, singing), so the sound of the first answer becomes the sound of the second. There is no rhyme in the formal sense, but this echo does a rhyme's work, tying the inert word to the living one.
"Singing master" is a slightly old-fashioned phrase, a teacher of voice, and it gives the city a quiet authority. Notice the preposition as well. The city sings *to* its people, not *for* or *with* them. We are listeners, perhaps pupils, in the offices where we work and the homes where we rest. Putting "office" beside "home" covers a whole urban day, public and private, and suggests the city's song reaches both. The poem ends on "home," a long, open vowel that fades like a held note.
That last word is worth a second look, because it exposes how close the two answers are. Look back and nearly everything in the poem is domestic: house, drawers, home. Only "office" steps outside. So the poem's choice may be less stark than it first appears. Both versions fold the city into the language of the household, and what separates them is whether that household is silent and stacked or alive with sound. The poem never says which it prefers, though the second option has the energy, the verbs and the longer lines, while the first closes up like a drawer.
The poem matters because it fits a real question about how we live into so few words. Are we inhabitants of a container, or people being addressed by something larger than ourselves? By ending on a question mark, the poem hands that question back to the reader. The title promises an enigma, and the poem delivers one that can be tested anywhere. Stand in your own town and ask which description fits. On different days, probably, both do.