In this poem an unknown force controls the speaker. Although the speaker never explicitly names what “lift[s them] up by the ribs / then lower[s them] into the dining room of a dollhouse” (Lines 10-11), there are greater forces at play. The reader can surmise that society at large is the unseen force causing the speaker to go from feeling as “a vivid god” (Line 17) to “sitting down there amidst the wallpaper” (Line 19). The sheer force and control the outside world has on humans is highlighted when the speaker explains that he “never [knows] from one day to the next” (Line 15) if he will be the one in control or the one controlled.

The command that this unseen force has over the speaker is so powerful that the speaker who was once the puppeteer to the dolls in the “dollhouse” (Line 11), now “sit[s] down there amidst the wallpaper, / staring straight ahead with [their] little plastic face” (Lines 19-20). Although the speaker was in total control of the dolls in the first stanza, they were never completely in control. Utter control is an illusion that can be taken away at any moment. As the speaker “sit[s] down there” (Line 19), he is within the grasp of the power that “lifted [him] by the ribs” (Line 10), and is now the same as the dolls he set “at the table” (Line 1) in the first stanza of the poem.