The title does a good deal of the work here. The poem never mentions a virus, a lockdown or a sickroom. It offers an open door, a cellar, a few hands of cards and one dead violin, and the word "quarantine" turns all of them into evidence. The central idea seems to be that when the road outward is closed, travel doesn't stop. It turns downward and inward, into shared company and imagination. But the last line makes sure that loss comes along on the trip.
The poem is a single sentence stretched over twelve lines, with no punctuation and no capital letters, so the reader never gets a full stop to rest on. It begins with a small puzzle: "an open door / and other simplicities / give occasion to call / a journey the way." To "call a journey the way" can be read as naming a journey a path or method, or perhaps something closer to a way of life. Either way, plain things like a door standing open are enough to start the idea of travel. Then the poem corrects itself. The door does this job "but not as well / as an ancient cellar." The line break after "the way" lets the claim stand for a moment before the next line retreats from it, and that small hesitation gives the poem its quiet, thinking-aloud tone.
The shape supports this. The poem is built from six couplets with no rhyme and no steady meter. Its lines run short, roughly four to seven syllables, and the rhythm sounds like speech slowed down. Because every stanza is a pair, the form echoes the "we" of the poem and the hands that are later held. Sound does some gentle work too. "Went down" and "drank" share a heavy d, and "fine rain" is a soft, open phrase. The final line, "dead of the plague," closes on hard consonants, and the poem simply stops there.
The imagery rewards slow reading. The cellar is "ancient," which makes it feel older than the present trouble. Judging by the imagery, it is a place where people have taken shelter before, though the poem doesn't say so. Going "down" is the opposite of the outward journey the open door promised, and it carries a faint hint of burial. "Fine rain" is the strangest phrase. It might be wine, which fits a cellar, or water stored there. The poem doesn't say, and that blurring is the point. Something that falls from the sky has become something drunk underground, so a closed-in space has taken on a bit of weather and the outdoors.
The best wordplay comes in "holding hands of cards / lying together." Holding hands is an act of tenderness, while a hand of cards belongs to a game, and the poem lets both meanings sit in one phrase. "Lying together" widens the effect. The cards lie face-down on a table, the people lie close in the dark, and in a card game lying means bluffing. A reader can hear intimacy and a little deceit at once, which suits a situation where people are making the best of things and not everything said aloud is quite true.
Then comes the violin, and it is the only one. "With the only violin / dead of the plague" can be read as a company of people lying beside a lifeless instrument, or as the violin's player having died, with the instrument standing for the person. Either way, the scene is a party with its music removed. Everything before it has been companionable, with the cellar, the drink and the cards, and the last couplet pulls that comfort down to earth. The tense matters here as well. The opening lines are in the present ("give occasion"), while the cellar scene is in the past ("we went down"). The cellar may be a memory, a story or something imagined, which makes the journey a mental one, as quarantine often forces.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It doesn't lecture about isolation or announce an emotion. It lets a few objects and one sudden death imply how confinement feels, with its small pleasures, its borrowed adventures and its shadow. Twelve short lines are enough to make an ordinary door, a deck of cards and a silent violin feel like a whole situation, and that compression is what lingers after the poem ends.