Thirty-odd words, no punctuation, no capital letters, and still the poem manages to unsettle. "Instruction" is built around a single order, given by "a voice in my head", to "go under". The poem never says where, or why, or whether the voice can be trusted. It offers three comparisons and stops.
The opening lines are deliberately slippery. "above all music / is a voice in my head" can be read two ways. Perhaps the speaker is saying that, more than anything else, music is an inner voice: the thing we really hear is not sound but something inside us. Or the voice sits "above all music", ranked higher than any melody. Without commas to guide us, both readings stay alive. The tense is slippery too. The voice "is" in the head, but the instruction "said", as though the speaker is half remembering an order that came long ago and has never quite left.
The command itself, "to go under", is a wonderfully flexible phrase. We go under water, under anaesthetic, under sleep, and in older idiom we also "go under" when we fail or die. The poem does not choose. Instead it gives three similes, each introduced by "like" or "or", and each answers the question differently.
"Like light into a hole" is the strangest. Light is usually what drives darkness away, yet here it vanishes into an emptiness. Is that a sacrifice, a surrender, or simply what light does when it meets a pit? "Or a heart into a book" turns tender, even a little comic, since anyone who has lost themselves in a novel knows the feeling. Yet the image has a second edge. A heart placed inside a book is also something pressed, closed in and shelved, like a flower flattened between pages. Reading becomes both rescue and burial. Both similes also use the same preposition, "into", so the descent is always a movement inward and downward at once.
The last line, "or enemies to sleep", is the sharpest. Grammatically it is incomplete, since the verb has dropped away, and that gap lets the line mean two things. Enemies can be lulled into sleep, defeated by gentleness. But "put to sleep" is also a euphemism for killing, and the poem's final word carries that shadow. After the soft images of light and a heart, the ending is cooler and more dangerous. The instruction might be a lullaby, or it might be a threat dressed as one. The poem ends before we can tell.
The shape of the poem supports this. It begins with two couplets, balanced and orderly, and then breaks into two lone lines, each hanging by itself after a gap of white space. The poem seems to follow its own instruction, thinning out as it goes down. The lines also get shorter toward the end, and the last one is the quietest. There is no rhyme scheme, but there is a small, satisfying echo as "head" and "said" chime across the stanza break. That sound connects the voice to what it says, as if the head and the command were almost the same thing. Elsewhere the music is in the vowels: the rounded "o" of "go", "hole" and "book" gives the second half a hollow, sinking sound, like something dropping into a well.
The title matters as well. "Instruction" suggests a manual or a lesson, something clear and practical. Yet what follows is only a reported voice and a handful of images, and the speaker never says whether the order was obeyed. The poem therefore teaches by example. The three similes work like a small set of directions, and each one asks the reader to imagine going under in a different way.
What makes the poem worth studying is how much it does with so little. It turns a single phrase into a wide field of meaning, from sleep and reading to surrender and death, and it leaves the choice to the reader. It also treats an inner voice as something half comforting and half uncanny, a presence that speaks in the speaker's own head yet seems to come from somewhere else. By withholding punctuation, a clear verb and a final answer, the poem makes us do what it describes. We sink into the lines, and when they end we are left a little below the surface.