The title sets up an expectation and the poem then sidesteps it. "Dressing up for a dressing-down" promises a scene of reprimand, someone putting on their best to face a telling-off. The scolding never arrives. Instead, the poem takes the word "dress" through four small stanzas until clothes stop working as armour and end up asleep.
The first two stanzas are built as a pair. In the first, "in my old cloth suit / my usual answer / is to dance." In the second, "dressed in a new disappointment / I go blank as / any messenger." The grammar matches, but the moods split apart. The old suit is a comfortable, broken-in thing, and it brings a bodily, cheerful reply to whatever question life is asking. The poem never says what that question is, and the gap makes "usual" sound like a lifelong habit. Disappointment, by contrast, is "new," stiff and unfamiliar, and it is worn like a garment too. Wearing it empties the speaker out. "Blank" suggests a face giving nothing away, and the messenger is someone who carries news without owning it. The phrase may recall the old saying about not blaming the messenger, which would tie back to the scolding in the title, though that link is an inference. Either way, the speaker has no dance for this outfit.
The form is plain and tight. There are four tercets, no punctuation, no capital letters except the lone "I," and no rhyme. The lines are short, and the break after "as" in "I go blank as / any messenger" makes the reader hang for a moment, briefly blank themselves. The sound is quiet and conversational, but it has its moments. "Old cloth suit" is three heavy monosyllables in a row, and the line slows to a thud like thick fabric. Elsewhere the poem builds a web of echoes. "Dressing," "dressed" and "undressed" keep circling the same root, and "dance" returns as "dancing," as if the poem itself were moving in small steps.
The third stanza is where the idea turns. "dressed or undressed / after a little dancing / how little clothes cover us." The missing punctuation lets the last line work as both a statement and an exclamation. "How little" carries two meanings. Clothes cover very little of the body, and they also do very little to protect us from being seen. The word "little" has already appeared in "a little dancing," so the poem suggests that a bit of movement is enough to loosen the whole pretence. Dancing, the speaker's "usual answer," turns out to be exposing as well as joyful. Whether the speaker is in the old suit or the new disappointment, the body ends up showing through.
The last stanza moves from standing to lying down, from "I" to "we," and from outer garments to underlayers. "so we lie / in our stockings and drawers" has a pleasantly old-fashioned ring. Those words feel softer and more intimate than "underwear" would. The poem doesn't say who "we" are, but judging by the tone, it suggests closeness, perhaps lovers or perhaps simply people in general. "Lie" quietly carries a second sense, since lying down is also the opposite of telling the truth, and the poem has just shown how clothes help us pretend. Then comes the surprise: "and all our clothes sleep." Personification gives the suits and the borrowed disappointments a rest of their own. Everything we put on to face the world, including the sadness, goes slack.
The poem is significant because it does so much with so little. In twelve short lines it turns a pun into a small philosophy. Our outfits, literal and emotional, are temporary costumes, and the thing underneath is more ordinary and more tender than any of them. There is no lecture and no bitterness. The ending is closer to relief. The dressing-down in the title never happens because, in the end, nobody is dressed for it.