Nobody in this poem gasps. The speaker describes fairyland the way a neighbour might describe the next county: how big it is ("bigger than you'd suppose"), who rules it, which of its residents are a nuisance. That flat, confiding tone is the poem's central strategy, and it works because the strangeness arrives in such practical packaging. Even the opening landscape, where the land "disappears into the sky, / above the trees, one smudgy line," gives us a horizon where boundaries blur, which is the right place for the ordinary rules to go soft.
The poem is written in free verse, with no regular rhyme or metre. Its rhythm is the rhythm of talk, with sentences that stop and start the way speech does. When the Queen wants the speaker to marry her youngest son, the refusal is a single short line: "I wouldn't." The reasons come out hesitantly, and the line breaks make the hesitation visible: "there was something / not quite right about him." Then comes "maybe the way / his nails grew long and blue-tipped / instead of white and pink." The speaker can't name what is wrong and falls back on one small bodily detail. That detail is more unsettling than any grand description of an enchanted prince would be.
The second stanza turns from royalty to pests, and the language gets homelier still. The imps "sour the milk and stale up the bread," turning nouns and adjectives into verbs the way people do in kitchens. They leave "footprints all over a fresh-iced cake / just for the fun of it." This is mischief on a domestic scale, and the stanza ends on its best image: an embroidered handkerchief "folded like a bedroll." In one phrase we see a tiny creature camping in a dresser drawer. It is funny, but it also suggests that someone small has been living alongside the speaker without her ever seeing them.
The changelings are where the poem's tone shifts. "Happens all the time" sounds like a remark about the weather, but what follows is a quiet sorrow. The taken babies "don't remember their mothers, / but sometimes, early mornings, / they get a longing look." Back in town, the mothers say of the replacement child, "This baby / is high-strung trouble." The poem lets both losses stand side by side: a child who half-misses a home it can't recall, and a mother who can't understand the child in her arms. The speaker knows more than either party and keeps silent: "They wouldn't believe me if I told." Read one way, this is about fairy lore. Read another, it is about how adults explain a baby they can't comfort, and how the truth can go unspoken because nobody would credit it.
The "big ones" get a more dignified treatment. Their horses are "so white / it looks like the moon is out even when it isn't," an image that brightens the whole stanza. They "go about their own business," and the speaker's attitude toward them is respectful rather than afraid. Her line "so is anything worthwhile" works almost as a motto for the poem. Danger and value come together, and the sensible response is not to avoid either but to "use your head."
The last stanza makes the poem's argument explicit. People once avoided talking about the fairies "or called them other names," and the speaker asks, "if they're fairies, why not say so?" Her proverb, "Truth is truth, and it will out," is plain and a little stubborn. The final line, though, is carefully hedged: "It hasn't done me any harm I can tell of." The qualifier "I can tell of" leaves a small gap. Perhaps there is harm she doesn't notice, or harm she isn't saying. A poem that has praised plain speaking ends on a faint, deliberate evasion, and that keeps the reader slightly off balance.
What makes the poem worth reading is this balance between comedy and unease. The speaker never insists that we believe her, and she never apologizes. The result is magic that feels lived in, with sour milk, rearranged handkerchiefs and a mother's tired complaint, and with a hint that the most ordinary things around us may have a second life we can't see.