A man walks along a sandy edge and blames "the wind or cloud." The verb matters. We never learn what is actually wrong, only that he looks outside himself for the cause. His excuse is "seasonal allergies," and the poem calls them an "alchemy," as though a vague inner discomfort could be turned into something small, physical and respectable. He "yields" to this explanation rather than choosing it, which suggests he is tired of looking for another. The central idea is that the restlessness of modern life is often disguised as something easier to name, and that the disguise cannot hold for long.
The poem is built in three stanzas of four, four and five lines. There is no rhyme and no regular beat. Lines are short and often break mid-thought, so "the alchemy / of seasonal allergies" lands with a small deflation, the grand word followed by the clinical one. Punctuation is almost absent. The only marks are a colon after "house" and a dash after "uncertainties," and both point forward, as if the poem cannot finish a thought and has to push on to the next. The final stanza is the longest and never reaches a full stop. The unresolved sentence feels like the restlessness it describes.
The line that gives the poem its title is its strangest image. Plastic flowers do not open, wilt or follow the seasons, so they cannot "keep time." Inside the house there is a imitation of nature that has stopped, while outside, real seasons make the man sneeze and suffer. He is caught between a living world that irritates him and a dead one that cannot comfort him. The phrase "moving in his house" can be read more than one way. It might describe the flowers, time itself, or the man pacing. That grammatical looseness unsettles the reader just as the man is unsettled.
The vocabulary repays a closer look. Three words close together, "alchemy," "allergies" and "alienation," share the same opening sound. Allergy comes from Greek roots meaning "other," and alienation comes from a Latin word for "belonging to another." Whether or not the poet planned it, the echo links the body's rejection of the outside world with the mind's rejection of other people. The physical complaint and the emotional one turn out to be the same thing under different names. Notice also how the poem moves from concrete things, "sandy edge" and "plastic flowers," to heavy abstractions, "fears and uncertainties" and "strangeness." As the man retreats inward, the language loses its solid objects.
The last stanza is the most disturbing. He "grows walls of alienation," and the verb is darkly ironic. In a house of plastic flowers, the only things that grow are the barriers around him. He is "suffering images / of strangeness every moment," so even the pictures in his mind are something he endures like an illness. Then comes the odd phrase "sensing shade of a nude." A shade could be a shadow, an outline or a faint impression, and a nude is a body stripped of cover. It might hint at desire, or at his own exposure, or at an artwork. The poem will not say, and that withholding is deliberate. The closing line, "survives their helplessness," has a pronoun with no clear owner. We cannot tell whose helplessness he survives, and survival here means getting through, not winning.
The poem is significant for how much it leaves unsaid. It never names a loss, a quarrel or a place, so a reader cannot treat the man's trouble as one particular story. He is anyone who has called a mood the weather, or filled a room with imitation life to avoid noticing how still it has become. The poem offers no consolation and no lesson. It gives a few exact images, a handful of sounds that quietly rhyme in meaning, and a sentence that stops without ending. For a student, it is a good example of how a poem can say a great deal by what it refuses to explain.