Eight lines, only five of them original, and the three repeated ones are the bleakest. That is the first thing to notice about "Done." Leanne uses the triolet, a compact form built on return: line one comes back as lines four and seven, line two comes back as line eight, and the whole thing runs on just two rhymes. For a poem about something that cannot move forward, the choice is exact.
The subject is a dream that has died and what rushes into the space it leaves. The poem names no person, no event and no reason, and that vagueness keeps the loss raw rather than anecdotal. Its central idea is that the collapse of hope does not leave a quiet emptiness. It leaves something hungry. The visions that once promised something turn into "formless beasts" that "consume / The flesh of innocence and trust."
The opening image carries much of the weight. A barren womb is a place made for beginnings where nothing can begin, and "haggard" intensifies that. The word usually describes an exhausted face, so applying it to a womb makes the body seem worn out by waiting. The dream is treated like something conceived and carried that never reaches birth. Then comes "dust," and the poem holds the start and the end of a life inside one pair of lines. The grammar adds to this: "is fallen" rather than "has fallen" is old-fashioned and has the ring of scripture or a burial service. The dream does not collapse as an event. It simply stays collapsed.
The middle lines shift from loss to threat. "Dream" and "visions" are near-synonyms, but the visions now "loom," a verb for something large, half-seen and menacing. Hopeful imagining has curdled into nightmare. "Formless beasts" is a neat contradiction: "beasts" promises bodies and teeth, "formless" takes away any outline, so the fear can't be pinned down or fought. The cruelest moment is "the flesh of innocence and trust." Two abstract nouns are given flesh so they can be eaten, and the damage moves from a thing hoped for to the person who did the hoping. "How they consume" reads like a gasp, the speaker watching it happen.
The sound of the poem supports this. Every line is a steady eight syllables in an iambic beat ("As BAR-ren AS the HAG-gard WOMB"), regular as a tolling bell, and nothing in the rhythm offers relief. The two rhyme families also contrast. "Womb," "loom" and "consume" share a long, hollow "oo" that ends with the lips pressed shut. "Dust" and "trust" end in short, hard stops, like a door closing. One group sounds like a hollow space and the other like the thud of the end.
The refrain is where the form does its cleverest work. When line one first appears, it hangs: "As barren as the haggard womb" begins a comparison with nothing yet to compare. Line two supplies the missing half. When the line returns after "the visions loom," it seems to describe the visions, and the monsters are barren too, producing nothing but appetite. When it returns after "innocence and trust," it seems to describe what has been devoured. The same words take on a darker meaning each time, which is the opposite of progress. By the final couplet, the two refrains join into one complete sentence, the comparison finally closed: the dream is as barren as the womb.
Triolets in English are often light, playful pieces, where the circling repetition feels charming. Here the same circling becomes a trap. The speaker, and the reader, keep arriving back at the same two statements and cannot get past them. The title "Done" works the same way. It is a verdict on the dream, and it also describes the poem, which finishes exactly where it began, with nothing gained.
That is the poem's achievement. In just eight lines it shows how form can carry meaning. A reader does not need to be told that the situation feels inescapable, because the structure makes them experience the repetition for themselves.