Hardly anything in "Changes" stays what it is for longer than a line or two. The sun becomes the moon, the moon becomes a face, a field appears, snow falls onto summer. The poem is about the mind in the act of dreaming and thinking, a place where images dissolve into one another without asking permission. Its central idea seems to be that thought is a transforming force, and that where it finally arrives is contact between minds, not solitude.
The opening lines set the terms. "The thought warms its hands over its own thinking" is a small paradox. Thought is both the person at the fire and the fire itself, a mind that sustains itself by turning inward. The next line, "The frost, because of crickets singing," has no verb and a baffling cause. Crickets belong to warm evenings, yet here their song brings frost. Logic gives way to dream logic almost at once, and the poem never goes back.
The key verbs do the structural work. "Becomes" appears twice, "transforms" twice, and "changes" is both the title and a verb in the second stanza. The poem is built from these shifts rather than from a story. It has no rhyme and no regular meter. Its stanzas are short, sometimes a single line, and the lengths vary from the long first line to the bare "Another thought enters." That line also shows the grammar behaving like the imagery. "Enters" is followed directly by "Transforms the colors to their proper places," with no "and" to join them, as if the sentence itself has slipped into a new shape. The conjunction arrives only with "And sweeps the darkness from the mind." Here the imagery turns domestic. The mind is a room, colors are put "in their proper places" like objects tidied away, and darkness is swept out with a broom. After so much dissolving, the idea of a *proper* place is a surprise, as though thought can restore order as well as scramble it.
The next stanza complicates that order. "The moon becomes the face / But the dream transforms them to an open field." The "but" suggests the face was not the end point, yet it is unclear what it contrasts with. "Them" is also ambiguous. It could mean the moon and the face, or perhaps two people, which would prepare for the "they" at the end. The field is "Shining and wonderful," two plain, almost childlike adjectives. The poem does not describe the field, it simply announces it, and that bare wonder suits a dream, which seldom explains its own beauty.
The seasons then collide. "The snow begins to fall / On the brown hair of summer" works in two ways. Summer is personified, with hair that could belong to a person, and the same hair also suggests browning grass at the end of the season. Cold touches warmth gently here, with no sense of disaster. The poem keeps returning to this pairing: hands warmed against frost, snow on summer, and finally wine, which warms from inside. Judging by the imagery, warmth is something thought must make for itself in a cold world.
The ending gathers these threads. "They drink the thought of autumn wine" is a strange phrase. What they drink is the idea of the wine, not the wine itself. Then comes the last line, "And thought touches thought." Set beside the first line, it shows how far the poem has moved. At the start a single thought warmed itself alone, and by the end two thoughts, and the "they" who hold them, reach each other. The poem has traveled from private self-absorption to something like communion, while its seasons and images have changed around it.
That is where its interest lies. Instead of explaining how a mind works, "Changes" lets the reader feel the sliding, with its odd causes, ambiguous pronouns and missing conjunctions. We are never told who "they" are, and the poem is better for it, since the reader is left to fill in that shared warmth. The poem is slight on the page, but it suggests that thinking is never fixed, and that its best moments come when one mind meets another.