The speaker addresses a house as if it were a living thing, telling it to dance. The house shifts through images: pale as a corpse under the moon, bright as a pile of salt in the sun, wearing a "wig of rain" that streams from the eaves. Against this playfulness sits a darker idea. The people who live inside it, the speaker says, are "little more than ghosts," passing through something that will outlast them, at least for a while.
Even the house, though, is not permanent. The speaker asks how long it can keep sitting there while the moon circles "like a madman" and flowers fade, and calls it a "sterile seed" that doesn't have forever. The mood is tender but uneasy, a lullaby that comforts and warns at once. The last image, a white sail rocking over open water far away, feels like a quiet release: something small, mobile, and free, set against the stillness of the house.