The poem opens with a command and a deadline: "Make a stir now / for you cannot stir then." The verb works twice, meaning both to move and to disturb, so the speaker is urging us to rouse ourselves and to shake things up. The reason comes in a line that can be read two ways. "After death only answers: / no more questions" could mean that death alone supplies answers, or that death is the only reply there is. Either way, the answer is that asking is over. Curiosity belongs to the living, and the poem treats it as a privilege with an expiry date.
The next image is the "morning star" that "is the evening star." The poem never names it, but this is the same planet, Venus, seen at opposite ends of the day. Beginning and ending turn out to be one thing under two names, which prepares the sudden flat statement "and sense is gone." The word "sense" is deliberately loose. It can mean meaning, or it can mean the senses themselves, and the poem loses both in the same breath.
The idea of two-in-one deepens with the "dyad." Death and the dyad are "twins," and the dyad is spelled out as "you and yourself." Consciousness, on this reading, is a doubling: one part of us watches the other. Death ends the pairing, and both parts go "together gone / as they came." The closing pair, "pool and paragon," is the most compressed. A pool is a surface in which a self sees its reflection, and a paragon is an ideal model of excellence. Between them they suggest the mirror and the image of perfection we hold up to ourselves. The exclamation "O consciousness!" is left ambiguous, and it could be wonder or lament.
The second part turns inward. "Those feelings / objectless" are the moods that attach to nothing in particular, which "you counted your soul." The speaker asks where they go, and the answer is a pair of sounds, "Desire – and dread," bound by alliteration like the dyad before them. Then comes a short run of near-rhymes: "womb," "come," "whom." "Womb" and "whom" are true rhymes, "come" a looser echo, and the sound of the word the poem leaves out, "tomb," hangs behind them. "Ask not for whom..." borrows the familiar phrase about the bell and then lets it trail off in an ellipsis, so the bell never actually tolls. The silence is placed on the page.
The final lines turn the poem on its own form. "Give place to silence / between verses; / be without refrains" is advice about living, but it also describes how this poem behaves. Its stanzas are unrhymed, its lines short and clipped, and its pauses made of colons, semicolons and white space. A refrain is a comforting return, and the poem withholds that. It is no accident that the first part runs to fourteen lines, the length of a sonnet, without taking on a sonnet's rhymes or neat closure.
The last four lines then reverse an earlier image. Where the speaker "counted" a soul, as if the invisible interior could be tallied, we are now told to "Count each smallest thing / you can see" and to "Hear out / each bodily note / to infinity." The counting moves from the abstract to the concrete, and "bodily note" could be a heartbeat, a breath, or a single musical tone. "Hear out" means to listen right to the end without interrupting. The word "infinity" lands on the final line and quietly contradicts everything finite before it. The poem suggests that a limited life can still hold unlimited attention.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal of easy comfort. It promises no afterlife and offers no consoling refrain, but it does not collapse into gloom either. It begins with an urgent reminder of death and ends with a practice, a way of paying close attention to what is in front of us. In barely thirty short lines it moves from philosophy to something close to meditation instruction, and the move feels earned because the vocabulary of stirring, counting and listening has been built up along the way.