The title does a good deal of the poem's work before the first line begins. "Ukiyo" is a Japanese word that can be written to mean the "sorrowful world," a Buddhist sense of life as fleeting and full of grief. A homophone gives the "floating world," which came to suggest the pleasures and entertainments of Edo-period city life. Bonta offers no explanation, but the double meaning fits the poem, which asks whether sorrow and pleasure can be separated at all.
The poem opens by turning on a comfortable phrase: "'Time enough' is a cheat." The quotation marks make it sound overheard, the stock reassurance we use to put things off. The speaker calls it a cheat, and the vocabulary of games takes over: "cheat," "good sport," "losing." Nobody is promised a win. The line "we make good sport / of losing" is wry and a little defiant, because "make sport of" can mean to play and also to mock. We lose anyway, so we might as well be good at it, and perhaps enjoy it. Cheating would only mean pretending the game is not rigged by mortality.
Then the voice changes. The general "we" gives way to a personal, almost greedy imperative: "Give me." It sounds like someone ordering at a bar, or a prayer stripped of politeness. What the speaker asks for is "the passing of things," a phrase with no sentimental decoration. The colon that follows promises examples, and the two it gives are small and human rather than grand.
The first is "heart / breaking in the opera." The line break lets "heart" sit alone at the end of a line before it "breaks" into the next, so the form acts out the image. The setting matters too. Opera is staged, costumed grief, a heartbreak people buy tickets to watch. The poem seems to find nothing shameful in that. Sorrow turned into art is one of the ways people enjoy loss, which brings us back to the "good sport" of the opening, and to the title's pairing of sadness with pleasure.
The second example is the most intriguing: "a love done / after a little sin." The short line "a love done" is the briefest in the poem, and it stops as abruptly as the love it describes. "Done" can mean finished or over. "After" can mean "following," so the love ends once a small transgression has happened. But the preposition also has an artist's sense, as in a painting "done after" another, in the manner of an original. I can't say the poem intends this, but the ambiguity enriches it. Even a love that has ended may be a copy, an imitation of something earlier. The word "little" is also revealing. The sin is minor, almost affectionate, and the poem doesn't moralize. The love seems to end through ordinary human lapses, not catastrophe.
The poem's sound supports its attitude. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the lines are short and plain, built mostly from everyday one-syllable words: "cheat," "sport," "heart," "sin." The only polysyllabic flourish is "opera," the single theatrical word in a poem otherwise stripped down. The enjambments ("Give me / the passing") make the reader lean forward from one line to the next, so that reading itself becomes a small experience of passing. The sentences are short too, closing with the semicolon, the full stop, and the colon, and the last line ends with a stop that leaves the reader with only what has gone.
The poem's significance lies in how much attitude it fits into seven lines. It doesn't console, and it doesn't wallow. It rejects the promise of "time enough" and puts in its place an appetite for transience: the wish to be given the fleeting thing itself, heartbreak and imperfect love included. For a student reader, it shows how a very small poem can carry a whole philosophy, and how a single title can open a poem onto another culture's way of thinking about loss. It suggests that what ends is not a cheat but the only game on offer, and that the poem's speaker has chosen to play it fully.