The title promises a lesson, but the poem never spells one out. It shows a figure dancing and lets the dance do the teaching. The poem doesn't say who this "you" is. The diminutives "hawklet" and "eaglet", along with the skipping and the laughter, suggest a young person, perhaps a child, but that is an inference from the imagery. The figure stays lightly sketched, more a presence than a portrait. What matters is what that presence does to the "we" of the second stanza, a group convinced that the world has lost its shape.
The opening is deliberately unsettled. "Not for gold, but for love–" begins as if we have walked in on the middle of a thought, and the dash leaves it hanging. Hawks and eagles are birds of prey, creatures of power, yet the tiny endings of "hawklet" and "eaglet" turn them tender. The wings in "light and supple like wings" belong to arms, so the body itself seems to lift. The phrase "skipping along the wind in the joy" is slightly off-idiom. That small "the" gives the joy a particular, almost named quality. The first line turns gold away, yet the stanza ends with "diamonds following your flying feet". Wealth turns up uninvited, a glittering trail rather than a prize.
Then the music changes. "So desperate we've been, for so long" has inverted, weary syntax, and the stanza is full of hard consonants: "Faces tight as tambourines jangling / our despair, our hearts pounding / prophecies of destruction." The tambourine is an instrument of celebration, but here the faces are stretched like its skin and made to jangle with misery. The pounding hearts become drums beating out doom. The image of marionettes "with tangled strings" takes away agency altogether, since puppets don't choose their "spasms". The musical images build toward a bleak question: "Perhaps there is no music, / no pattern anymore. / Perhaps there never was." The short lines and the repeated "Perhaps" sound tentative, but the last line is the most frightening because it wipes out the past as well as the present.
The turn comes with "But here you are at last". The repeated "here you are" has the relief of someone finally arriving at a door. The key verb is "spin". The figure spins "perfection", and "spin" can mean both whirling and making thread. Where the puppets had tangled strings, the dancer makes something orderly. The answer to the question about pattern is that someone makes one in front of us, which is not the same as proving that pattern exists. The darkness is not defeated either. The perfection is spun "all around the margins of the dark", at its edges, so the dark is circled rather than conquered.
The closing lines are the poem's neatest trick: "With nothing to lose, you lost nothing, / and nothing at last was lost." The word "nothing" changes meaning three times. First it means having no possessions or stakes, which calls back to "Not for gold". Then it means suffering no loss. In the last line it is almost a quiet noun, and the thing the "we" feared, destruction, simply fails to happen. The almost entirely one-syllable words and the soft l-sounds ("lose", "lost", echoing "lovely" and "laughing") slow the poem to a calm finish. The "at last" that greeted the dancer returns here, as if arrival and reassurance were the same event.
The poem is in free verse with no rhyme, and it works through repetition and sound ("spin and spin", "nothing" three times). Its shape is telling too. The stanzas run five lines, then nine, then six, so despair gets the most room. Yet it is framed on both sides by joy, and the poem ends there.
The poem is worth reading because it resists argument. It never tells us despair is mistaken, and the "Perhaps" is never refuted. Instead it makes a quieter claim about teaching: people are sometimes shown that pattern is possible by someone who moves as though it already exists, and no one has to be lectured into believing it.