Nobody in "Garden Party" seems bothered that a gale is blowing. The speakers are dancing, an alligator is winding a kitestring around his tail, and a foolish old bassoon man has a catfish on his plate. Nothing adds up, yet the voice never loses its composure, like a host passing the sandwiches while the marquee flaps. That composure is the poem's real subject. Its central idea, as far as a poem like this can be pinned down, is that "fury" and "fate" can be met with a straight face, a tune to dance to and, eventually, a cup of tea.
The cleverest move is that the poem borrows the grammar of sensible argument and spends it on nonsense. "We do not have to worry / if the fury can't abate, / for the foolish old bassoon man / has a catfish on his plate": the word "for" promises a reason, and what follows is no reason at all. The refrain does the same with morals. "The moral of the story / is the wellspring of the fool" has the ring of a proverb, but it can be read several ways (fools are where morals spring from, or moralising makes fools), and "the quarrel of the sorry / is the spinning of the spool" refuses to settle the matter. The refrain returns word for word, so it behaves like the spool it mentions: it turns and arrives back where it started.
Sound does the work that sense won't. Most lines alternate between eight and seven syllables, a swinging, chant-like pattern that feels like a skipping rhyme. Only the even lines rhyme, and in the first stanza they lean on one vowel: gale, tail, abate, plate, fate. Five lines tied to a single long *a* give the stanza the pull of a tune returning to its home note. The odd lines are left unrhymed, and that is where the strangest nouns sit (dingbat, alligator, bassoon man, foremast), as though rhyme were the host keeping order while the guests misbehave. The last stanza keeps the plan but changes the sounds: moon and balloon, then tree, sea, tea. Only in its final four lines does the count shift, with the "long-awaited pirate ship" stretching to nine syllables and "comes sailing from the sea" shrinking to six. The unrhymed "cake" even echoes the long *a* of the first stanza.
The images repay a slower look. "Dingbat" is a slippery word. It can mean a printer's ornament or a silly person, and the poem never says which, so dancing on one is delightfully unstable. Then there is string: a kitestring in the first stanza, the "string of the balloon" in the third, the spool in the refrain. Things that fly in this poem are tethered, which suggests (this is an inference) that however wild it gets, someone is holding the end. The "streamlined fancy foremast" casts a shadow on "our fate", and it seems to anticipate the pirate ship of the last stanza, which is "long-awaited" rather than feared. Even the demons are defanged. They do "their darndest", a word from the nursery rather than from hell, and their great crime is knocking acorns from a tree.
The ending is built as "when... when... then", and the conditions are impossible: roses forgotten in the gardens of the moon, chickens riding a balloon string into the sky. So the cake may never be cut, or the whole whirl of gale and alligator may be the party, already under way. The poem lets both readings stand. What it insists on is an order of importance: the most ordinary things in it, cake and tea, come last, as the reward for getting through everything strange. That is why it is worth reading aloud and then rereading. The nonsense is not careless, because each silly image is held in place by rhyme, syllable count and repetition. The effect is a small lesson in poise: you don't have to calm the storm to enjoy the party.