Art is offered here as something that lifts you, "our best wing", but the next lines take that back. Being lifted turns out to feel like "hanging by the neck", so the thing that lets us rise is also the thing that chokes. The speaker seems to love art and be unsettled by it at once.
The middle stanzas make that unease stranger. A well-made house is "so like a thought" that the speaker goes home, as if a perfect creation were almost too close to the mind to bear. Then comes a odd lesson: teaching the ear "not to understand sounds" so that real learning can happen. Judging by this, understanding too quickly may block seeing or hearing clearly.
The ending turns to the dead, who inherit only "moth and fur". It's a bleak, quiet image of what remains of a life. The mood is spare, dry and slightly eerie, with a student's earnestness set against the knowledge that everything decays.