Two small scenes sit side by side in these five lines: boys dancing at dusk, and sailboats drifting over water they already know. Nothing says what is being celebrated, and the title, "Anniversary," is the only clue. That gap is the poem's real subject. An anniversary is the same date coming round again, and the poem quietly asks whether anything about a returning day can ever be new.
The first stanza gives its dancers a double disguise. Harlequin is the stock figure of the comic stage, a masked trickster in a patchwork costume, so calling the boys "harlequins" turns them into performers of a role that has been played many times before. The syntax is slightly loose. After the comma that follows "sunset," the phrase "red-haired boys" can be read as a second look, as if the speaker were glancing again and seeing the real children under the paint. The colours also match. "Sunset" and "red-haired" echo each other, so the boys seem to have caught fire from the sky. The most telling phrase is "Eaton's costumes." The possessive tells us the clothes belong to someone else. The poem never says whether Eaton is a person or a shop, and the text alone can't settle it. Either way, the boys are dancing in ready-made identities. They are young and vivid, yet what they wear has been handed to them, the way a ritual hands out its roles.
The second stanza moves from bodies to boats, and from performance to drift. "Sailboats muse" is a small piece of personification. To muse is to think without a deadline, and the word also contains an echo of the Muse, the figure who inspires artists, as though the boats were waiting for inspiration to arrive. They move "over well-known waters," a route learned by heart. Then comes the best paradox in the poem: they are "idly searching for new waves." On a familiar sea, waves are the one thing never repeated exactly, so the boats look for novelty in the place where it is guaranteed. Yet "searching" implies they are not sure of finding it, and "idly" drains the verb of urgency. The mood is closer to gentle boredom or contentment than to hope.
The construction supports this. The poem is in free verse with no rhyme, and it never returns to a sound it has already used, which suits a poem about the difficulty of true repetition. The line lengths change. The first stanza runs roughly six syllables, three, then six, and the short middle line, "red-haired boys," lands with two heavy beats like a foot stamped in the dance. The second stanza stretches to about nine syllables and then seven, and it is one unbroken sentence with no internal commas, so the reading slows and glides like a hull on water. The first stanza, with its commas and fragments, feels more staccato.
Sound does some of the thinking too. Soft s-sounds drift through "Harlequins," "sunset," "costumes," "sailboats" and "searching." Then "well-known waters" and "new waves" share their w, while "known" and "new" begin with the same n sound, though the spelling hides it. The familiar and the fresh are set so close together that they almost blur.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves to the reader. It never explains the anniversary or says whether the repetition is comforting or slightly empty. It gives two images, dancers in borrowed clothes and boats looking for new waves on old water, and lets the title connect them. Both suggest an occasion that keeps its form while hoping for fresh life inside it. The tone is neither mournful nor celebratory but wry and observant, and in only a few lines it makes the reader think about what we are doing each time we mark a day we have marked before.