The poem begins like a joke between old acquaintances: "My body, eh? Friend Death, how now?" Death is no hooded terror here but a slow, rather tiresome official. His "tedious pomp of writ" suggests a legal summons, and the body is property he has been "reclaim[ing]" "bit by bit." The speaker's central claim is that the self is not the same as the failing body. What truly belongs to a person is what that person has done, and the two parts of the body that did it, the hand and the heart.
The first five stanzas keep up the sardonic tone. The body has become a "shrivelled lump of suffering clay," so altered that it has "not of kith or kin a trace" to the one the speaker once carried. The question "Didst ever see that face before?" is both funny and chilling, since it asks Death, of all callers, to fail to recognize the person he has come for. Death is teased for his "lagging gait" and for the "mistaken pity" that makes him wait for "timorous ones." Dying, the speaker says, will be a release: "I shall be free when thou art through." The body is a prison ("chained and bound"), and Death is a locksmith who is merely slow.
Then comes the turn: "Stay! I have lied." The abruptness is the poem's best moment. The speaker has just claimed to "grudge thee nought," and corrects herself like someone catching a small dishonesty on the threshold of the grave. She grudges two things, the right hand and the "quick-beating heart," because these "never gave me coward sign, / Nor played me once the traitor's part." They are described as loyal servants, which shifts the body from burden to comrade.
The eighth stanza widens the poem. The speaker recalls "olden days" when men "in barbaric love or hate" nailed an enemy's hands up "at wild crossways" or "shrined leaders' hearts in costly state." What once looked like cruelty or superstition now seems to her a kind of insight. People have always sensed that hand and heart are "the symbol, sign and instrument / Of each soul's purpose, passion, strife." The hand acts and the heart feels, so together they hold a person's "all of love, their all of life." The exclamations that follow ("O feeble, mighty human hand! / O fragile, dauntless human heart!") rest on paired opposites. The hand is weak now yet mighty in what it has done, and the heart is fragile yet dauntless. The contradiction is the point, since the poem is moved by how much strength a delicate thing can hold.
The form supports this movement. Most of the poem is in brisk, conversational iambic tetrameter, rhymed ABAB in quatrains, which keeps even the grim material light on its feet. The rhyme of "now" with "slow" in the first stanza is an eye rhyme, and it returns in the eleventh with the "veins so pallid and so slow." The poem quietly circles back to its start, but the tone has changed. The speaker's concrete detail ("wrinkled palm," "altered line") is more tender than anything in the opening. A palm's "line" also hints at palmistry and fate, as though even destiny had been rewritten by age.
The ending repeats earlier lines, "Ah, well, friend Death, good friend thou art" and "I shall be free when thou art through," but now the speaker gives up what she grudged: "Take all there is — take hand and heart." The last line, "There must be somewhere work to do," is the surprise. She does not promise heaven, rest or reunion. Her hope is for more work, and "somewhere" admits that she cannot say where. Tentative, stubborn and practical, it is a typical gesture of someone whose identity lies in effort.
The poem is memorable because it avoids both easy comfort and easy dread. It treats death with wit, honesty and a little vanity, and it makes an argument that still holds: we are not our wrinkled faces but what our hands have made and our hearts have risked.