Robinson introduces Reuben Bright as an honest butcher, not a brute, which makes the turn in the poem more striking. When Reuben learns his wife is dying, he doesn’t harden himself; he stares, trembles, and weeps so openly that the women around him cry too. The speaker clearly feels sympathy and a kind of respect for this unguarded sorrow.
After the funeral, Reuben pays the necessary people, then packs his wife’s handmade belongings in her chest with cedar boughs, as if storing both her memory and his grief. The final line is a quiet shock: he tears down the slaughter-house. It suggests that the work that once sustained him has become unbearable or meaningless after her death. The mood is somber, intimate, and finally devastating—less about violence than about how love and loss can break a person’s old life apart.