The speaker watches a dance performed to Tchaikovsky, choreographed by Isadora Duncan, with three women in orange veils. At first the energy is fierce: fists in the air, bare feet pounding the floor, ponytails whipping behind. The two young dancers seem restless, almost ready to bound off the stage in search of "another truth." They are animal-like and confident in their youth.
The poem then turns to the older dancer between them. Her arched, blue-veined feet and precise gestures keep the audience grounded in the present, in a "hard world" and "changing flesh." The speaker admires her deeply. Where the young dancers imagine escape, she understands that freedom comes through discipline, and that there is nowhere else to be.
The mood moves from wild and rebellious to calm and quietly moving. The closing rhymed couplet lands like a settled conclusion, and the poem ends on acceptance rather than defiance.