Nothing in "Composer" tells us what the music sounds like, and that is the first clue to how the poem works. It gives us a night, a crowd of instruments, a jar and a field, and lets sound reach us through the other senses. The title never reappears in the text, so we have to decide who the composer is: a speaker working on a score, or the poet himself, putting words together the way a musician puts notes together. The word "composer" does come from a Latin verb meaning "to put together," and the poem is a small arrangement of parts.
The opening image sets the method. "my night's work / is a fur of instruments." Work is usually hard and cold, but fur is warm, dense and animal. The instruments are heaped like a pelt, so sound becomes something you could stroke, many voices overlapping into one texture. Then comes the line break. "listening" sits alone at the end of its line, so it can attach to the instruments, as if the fur itself were listening, or it can start a new action. With no punctuation to settle it, the grammar wobbles on purpose. What follows is startling: listening is "breaking open the ear." Hearing here is not passive. It is closer to cracking a shell or a seed to reach what is inside.
The middle of the poem admits its own limit. The ear is broken open "with something / I cannot presently say." "Presently" is a slippery word. It can mean "at the moment," which suggests the saying might come later, or it can nudge us toward "in the present." The thing that cannot be said concerns "the simplicity of sea / or a rose touching skin." These two images sit at opposite scales, one vast and one intimate, joined by a casual "or" as if either would do. Both are things we feel before we can explain them. "Simplicity" is also the poem's quiet paradox: a night spent among many instruments is aiming at something simple.
Then the poem shrinks to a hand-sized gesture. "I take light in a jar" recalls catching fireflies, but it also suggests keeping something fleeting. The next line, "my head full of order," sits in the same position, and judging by the parallel the head is another jar, holding the order a composer imposes on all that fur and noise. The poem never says whether that order is a comfort or a confinement, and the ambiguity helps it.
The last couplet opens the window. "sleep hiding in the fields / green and singing." Sleep is personified, like a child playing hide-and-seek, and it has left the room. The composer is awake while sleep is out among the crops. This is also the one place where singing is actually named, and the singer is not an instrument but a landscape. "Green and singing" blends colour and sound into a single adjective pair, a final mixing of the senses the poem has been working with all along. We end outdoors, away from the desk and the jar, with the suggestion that what the composer is reaching for already exists in the natural world.
The construction supports this. The poem is six unrhymed couplets, twelve lines in all, with no punctuation and no capital letters except "I." The short lines and generous white space read like rests in a score, though that is an interpretation rather than anything the poem states. Sound does the work rhyme might have done. The hushing s and long e of "simplicity," "sea," "skin," "sleep," "green" and "singing" run through the poem like a repeated phrase. The final couplet is made almost entirely of single syllables, which slows the pace to a murmur.
What makes "Composer" worth reading is its honesty about its subject. It is a poem about making art that does not boast. It admits it cannot say the central thing, then shows that thing through texture, touch, light and colour. For a student, it is a useful example of how a poem can be about music without describing a single note, and how a chain of precise images can carry what direct statement cannot.