Nobody in "News from Nowhere" is at a ball, exactly, and nobody is at a funeral, exactly, but the poem keeps both pictures in view at once. Its subject is a dance in which the dancers are on fire, and the fire does not so much destroy them as complete them. By the last line the whole glittering performance has ended in a skeleton's laughter and a collapsing heart. The central idea seems to be that elegance, courtship and pleasure are inseparable from decay, and that the body in motion is already, quietly, a body on its way to bone.
The poem's first move is to make burning beautiful. The ladies are "lambent," a word meaning flickering softly over a surface, and the choice matters: it suggests light playing rather than flames devouring. They are compared to "some soft firework blown in disarray," an image that is both festive and fleeting, since a firework is by definition something that exists in order to end. Even their hair is a "curtsy," as though the strands were bowing, and their lips are "bright" and "beckon" while they "burn away." The grammar here is worth noticing: beckoning and burning away sit in the same line, so that invitation and dissolution are the same gesture. The title adds to the strangeness. "News from Nowhere" suggests a report from an unlocated place, and the poem does read like a dispatch from some dream-ballroom that belongs to no particular country or century. That the title echoes another well-known title is a coincidence I'd rather not build a theory on; the poem works on its own terms.
The second stanza turns to the men, and the tone sharpens. Their coats are "nimble" and made of fire, and the comparison to "snake-tongues dancing on the gilded stone" adds a note of menace and cold-bloodedness that the ladies' softness lacked. Gilded stone suggests a palace floor, wealth and display, while the snake-tongue hints at something predatory or at least treacherous. Their goal is "to marry burning to the lively bone." That phrase is the poem's hinge. Marriage, the most social of bonds, is here fused with fire and with the skeleton lurking inside living flesh. "Lively bone" is a deliberately uncomfortable pairing, because bone is what remains when life is gone, and yet it is called lively, as if death were already moving inside the dancers.
The third stanza delivers the blow. The old men "nod with sleep before the step is done": they cannot even finish the dance, and the verb "nod" has a double sense, a courteous bow and a drift toward unconsciousness or death. Their ladies respond not with grief but with "a widening grin," which reads as a skull's grin as much as a social smile. Then comes the "amusement of the skeleton," which "bursts," and "the red contracting heart caves in." The colour red appears nowhere else in the poem, so the heart arrives as the one fully bodily, fully human detail after so much shimmer, and it is crushed in a single line.
Formally, the poem is highly controlled, which makes its content more disturbing. It is built from three quatrains in iambic pentameter, rhymed ABAB in the first two stanzas (air/hair, disarray/away; fire/higher, stone/bone) and ABAB again in the third (done/skeleton, grin/in), though the last pair are slant rather than full rhymes. The steady ten-syllable line moves with the courtliness of a formal dance, so the reader is lulled by polish even as the images turn grim. Only at the end does the rhythm give way to something more abrupt, in "Bursts, and the red contracting heart caves in," where the stress falls hard and the line seems to collapse along with the heart it describes.
What makes the poem significant is that it treats mortality as an elegant spectacle, not a lament. It belongs to a long tradition of dances with death, but it needs no historical apparatus to land. Its images of fire, grin and bone are enough, and its sleekness is the point: the more beautiful the dance, the more thoroughly it has been consumed.