A cough is the last sound you would expect from the dead, and Rounds begins with it. "If the dead are coughing" sets up a conditional that sounds as though an answer is on its way. None arrives. The sentence swerves through a sparrow, a resurrection, a cup of water, a falling curtain and a ruined record, and it ends on an image rather than a conclusion. What emerges is a fear: that the dead, and perhaps memory itself, will be overlooked or silenced while the world carries on performing.
The poem has no punctuation and no question marks, yet nearly all of it is a question. The repeated "Or will" gives it an anxious, circling rhythm, as if the speaker keeps checking one worry and then finds another behind it. There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The first three lines each stand alone, like short held breaths, and then the poem lengthens into "Will they be neglected in the resurrection," its longest and most solemn line. The big, many-syllabled word "resurrection" is followed at once by plain, almost childish words: "denied a drink." The grandest hope in the poem is set beside the smallest need. Even the line "Of cool water" sits by itself, as slight and dry as the thing it asks for. Judging by the imagery, the dead are thirsty as well as forgotten.
The sparrow is the poem's strangest figure. It is an ordinary, small bird, but it "tears curtains / With high notes and disdain," as though it were a diva whose voice can shred fabric. "Tears" can also be read as the noun, and the pun hovers there, but the violent verb wins. Against this bright, cruel singing, the dead can only cough, which is hoarse, bodily and low. The one emotion the poem names is "disdain," and it belongs to the singer, not to the sufferers. The living world, or nature, performs on and does not care who is listening.
Then the curtain returns, this time as the curtain of a theatre, and the poem's metaphor shifts. "Will the curtain fall / In a furrow of diamond-cut shellac" is a hard line to picture until the title is remembered. "Stop the Music" is an order, and the final lines are built from the vocabulary of an old gramophone record. Shellac is what such records were pressed from, the furrow is the groove, and "diamond-cut" suggests both a jewel and the needle that rides the groove. "Furrow" also suggests ploughed earth, so the record is faintly a grave or a field as well, which fits a poem about resurrection. Sound is preserved in that groove, but the poem shows it damaged: "the label clawed away." Without the label nobody can tell whose voice is on the disc. The verb "clawed" echoes the sparrow's tearing, so the violence of the opening returns, now aimed at identity.
The last line, "And a hole in place of a heart," works on two levels. A record really does have a hole at its centre, the point it spins around. The poem turns that fact into a loss: the thing that should be the heart of the object is an absence. The poem stops there, with no full stop and no consoling answer.
The title's command is ambiguous, and that is part of the poem's power. The speaker may be pleading for the sparrow's mocking song to stop so the dead can be heard. Or the plea may come from the dead themselves, who cannot bear to have their music played back, nameless and hollow. The poem does not say which. Its significance lies in this refusal to settle. It takes a huge religious and emotional question, what happens to the dead and whether they are remembered, and makes it small, scratched and domestic, like something found in a drawer. Because the questions never close, the reader is left in the silence after the needle lifts, looking at the hole.