The poem begins like a shopping list. The first stanza is a catalogue of glass dragons, patterned eggs, bone bracelets and silken scarves, and it contains not a single verb. Everything simply sits, waiting to be bought. Even so, the comparisons hint at something bigger than merchandise. The eggs echo "things on the walls of caves," the golden bowls are "like Midas-touched baths," and the scarves twist "blue as the sea." Handmade objects are being measured against prehistory, myth and the ocean.
Then the poem turns on the visitor. "You have come to this hall / as you suppose, to purchase beauty" is a gentle trap, because "as you suppose" tells us the plan is about to fail. The shopper imagines a paper bag, a cupboard, a spot on the wall. Instead, verbs finally arrive: things "shift and hatch and grow, / peck out of their crackled wax-dyed shells." The eggs from the first stanza have come alive, and the catalogue turns out to have been a nest. The stanza ends with a line that has no full stop, "Some things will never belong." It can mean that these things will never belong to you, or that they will never belong to the ordinary, tidy world of cupboards. The missing punctuation leaves both readings open.
From there the poem works by dissolving boundaries. The retired art teacher in her "long orange dress" wears silver slippers "the color of her curling hair," so she matches her own artwork. The stanza's last sentence slides from her real action, drinking water from a blue bottle, straight into the painted scene on her boxes: "as two whistling peasants pick ripe apples for the Queen." The small word "as" joins the two worlds, so that the maker and her fairy tale seem to happen at the same moment. The fourth stanza goes further and shrinks the visitor. Dolls "peer out / from behind their maker's skirts," and a "giantess" binds dragonflies with gossamer thread. The vendors have become giants, and we have become the size of the dragonflies. The room has also quietly turned into a forest, with voices "echoing between the trees" and clay whistles sounding like birds. The word "hall" is long forgotten.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no regular metre and almost no rhyme, only loose, speech-like free verse. Within that looseness, though, Pratt keeps linking words through sound, as in "silken scarves," "shift and hatch and grow," and "peck out of their crackled." The "Here" that opens the first, fourth and fifth stanzas works like a stall-keeper's gesture, pointing and insisting that we look. Then, in the last four lines, the poem finally rhymes: "hands" and "expands." That rhyme is the only firm one in the poem, and it comes just as the potter's wheel turns, so the sound clicks shut like a lid.
The potter's stanza is the quietest and the strongest. His eyes "vanish when he smiles," and there is "earth under his nails / and in the patterns of his hands." Compare those hands with the Midas bowls of the opening. Midas's gold is dead, hoarded and untouchable, whereas this clay is soil, and his bowls and teapots "sprout like weeds," as though pottery were something that grows. The final image is the largest in the poem: "as he turns the wheel / the universe expands." A man at a wheel at a craft fair becomes a small creator-god, and that idea is meant seriously.
The poem is significant because it takes an event many people treat as a casual afternoon out and shows it as a place where making is still wonderful. Its central idea is that handmade things cannot be fully owned, because they carry the life of whoever shaped them. The poem does not argue this, and it lets the verbs and the shrinking viewer do the persuading. By the end we have stopped being customers and become guests in a small, generous universe.