Six short lines, no capitals, no punctuation, and somehow a whole queen is shut inside them. The title, "Antoinette", most likely points to Marie Antoinette, though the poem never says so. Everything that follows could just as well be read as a portrait of any queen, or of anyone cut off from the world and left waiting. The poem gives no events and no narrative, only a few objects and a mood of pressing stillness.
The first couplet sets the situation: "her own garden left her / to her red bed of velvet". The grammar is slightly odd. The garden leaves her, as if the outdoors has walked out on its owner, instead of her leaving it. She is abandoned by the living world and handed over to an interior of red cloth. "Garden" and "bed" also quietly belong together, since a flower bed is a garden's own kind of bed. The queen has lost the open, growing bed and kept only the upholstered one. The pairing "red bed" is a heavy double stress, and the colour could suggest luxury, but judging by the final stanza it may hint at blood too.
The second couplet gives the poem's strangest and best-known-sounding line: "the queen pretty as a horse". We expect "pretty as a picture", so the swapped word jolts us. A horse is beautiful, but it is also groomed, kept in a stable, shown and ridden. The comparison makes her ornamental and owned, admired as an animal is admired. Then comes "and full of time". We would expect "full of life" or "full of herself", and "time" is the unsettling substitute. It makes time something she is stuffed with and cannot spend, an idleness so complete it becomes a substance. It could also hint that time is running short, though that is an inference from the lines that follow.
Those lines bring in the blade: "the sight of a blade is sad / to the idle bread". Here the poem turns. The only emotion word in the whole piece, "sad", is given not to the queen but to bread. This is a clever displacement. The queen's idleness slides onto the loaf ("idle bread"), and her fear or sorrow does too. Bread is also the most basic food of ordinary people, so it carries associations of hunger and of the people outside the palace. A blade is what bread meets on a table, and for a queen's story it is hard not to hear a darker blade behind it. The poem lets both readings sit together without choosing. We might also read the bread as standing in for her: soft, waiting, soon to be cut.
The sound of the poem does quiet work where rhyme might be expected. There is no end-rhyme, but "red", "bed" and "bread" share one short vowel-and-consonant sound, so the first couplet and the last are tied together. "Blade" and "bread" also begin with the same pairing of consonants, which makes the final image feel inevitable, as if the blade and the bread were already linked in the language before the poem arrived. The rhythm is loose and speech-like. Lines of three or four beats ("her own garden left her") end on soft, unstressed words like "her" and "velvet", which gives a sinking, trailing feel. The last line is the shortest and ends on a flat, solid noun, "bread", which closes the poem like a plate being set down.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds back. It could have explained a life, a court, a downfall. Instead it keeps to a garden, a bed, a horse, a knife and a loaf, and trusts the reader to supply the rest. It is also oddly gentle. The queen is not accused or mocked, only pitied through the strange sadness of the bread. In a few lines, the poem shows that a famous name can be turned into a small, domestic scene, and that the scene can be more unsettling than a history lesson.