Before the poem has said anything, it has already tripped us up. "Ay rose" can be heard as "arose," as "a rose," or as a sigh ("ay") followed by a flower's name. The title, "Misconstrued," warns us to expect this kind of slippage, and the first two syllables enact it, since we can't be sure which word we've been handed. That uncertainty is the poem's subject: what happens when messages reach us garbled, and what we do with the leftovers.
The opening couplets read like an inverted, almost ballad-style sentence ("ay rose / a poor music"), with the music rising and "calling us / by wrong names." The line breaks do some quiet mischief here. "Calling us" on its own sounds like a summons, even a vocation. Only when "by wrong names" arrives on the next line is the call revealed as a mistake. Reading line by line, we misconstrue the sentence for a moment, just as the speakers are misnamed. "Poor music" works two ways as well, suggesting both bad quality and impoverishment, and the poem never says who or what is doing the calling. The music is the only agent, which gives it an impersonal, weather-like menace.
The third couplet moves from hearing to seeing: "we saw ourselves / reflecting in rust." "Reflecting" can mean mirroring or thinking, so the speakers are both looking at themselves and brooding on what they see. But rust is a ruined mirror. It is polished metal gone orange-brown and pitted, so it returns a dim, spoiled image. If the names were wrong, the reflection is wrong too, and identity is distorted from outside by sound and from below by decay. There may be a small colour-and-sound link between "rose" and "rust": both begin with that soft *r*, and both suggest reddish tones, so the flower of the first line seems to corrode into the metal of the sixth. That is an inference, but the poem's compression invites it.
The poem has no conventional rhyme and no punctuation, and everything is lowercase. Sound does the binding instead. The repeated *r* (rose, poor, rust, reflecting) and the short *i* of "ill" and "gizzard" tie the images together without the neatness of end-rhyme, which would feel wrong in a poem about things not lining up. The rhythm is also worth noticing. The lines begin as tiny fragments, "ay rose" at only two syllables, and gradually lengthen to the five-syllable lines of the final couplet. The poem seems to gather weight and breath as it goes. Two lines also begin with "we," the second time as "we who hear ill news," which turns the speakers from a group seeing something into a kind of people, defined by the habit of receiving bad news.
Then comes the last line, and its strangest word. A gizzard is the muscular organ in a bird that grinds food with swallowed grit, and it is also a blunt, faintly comic word for a person's insides, their guts. After "music" and "reflecting," the vocabulary drops suddenly to something earthy and physical. The poem's answer to ill news is not eloquence but digestion. Notice, too, that the speakers find "some gizzard," not "a" gizzard or "courage." The phrase is partial and unglamorous, and it promises only a bit of toughness, not triumph. The final clause also never gets a main verb. "We who hear ill news and find some gizzard" just hangs there, so the sentence ends unfinished, as the situation does.
The poem's significance lies in how thoroughly its form carries its meaning. It is a poem about misreading that makes us misread it, and then reread. It also declines to name the "ill news," which leaves it open to private grief and public alarm alike. In a handful of short lines it offers a modest, unsentimental picture of resilience: the world may call us the wrong names and show us a rusted face, yet something stubborn and bodily in us keeps grinding on.