A man hurries out of a public lavatory for the fifth or sixth time in one night, and the speaker watches him go. The poem has no title, only asterisks, and that suits a scene which seems to belong to no official register. Its subject is a brief encounter that goes wrong. Its central idea is that sympathy offered to someone in shame can feel like one more humiliation.
The setting is only partly stated. The word "urinal", the man's repeated comings and goings, and the phrase "still alone" suggest, judging by the imagery, a place where men go hoping to meet someone. The poem never says so outright, and that restraint is part of its tact. Everything depends on the double meaning of "releases". The word can mean relief of the body, or sexual release, or escape from loneliness, and the poem lets all three hang together. Calling this "most despised of all releases" tells us the man's contempt for it, though the poem frames that contempt as the speaker's guess: he "probably" rejected it for years.
That guesswork matters. Almost everything we learn about the man comes through hedges: "probably", "Surely", "almost". The speaker sees only a stiff back and a fixed stare, then builds a whole history of pride and self-denial on top of them. Even the sentence in which he does so is unusually contorted: "Now himself by it to be rejected / Surely must almost craze." The twisted word order, with its "rejected" at the end of one line echoing "rejected" at the end of an earlier one, makes the irony look almost like a mathematical reversal. The man who refused is now refused. The slightly old-fashioned "craze" gives the thought a formal, bookish ring, as if the speaker were reasoning about a stranger from a safe distance. Perhaps it also echoes the man's own clerkly stiffness.
The sound of the opening line does similar work. "Stiff, clerkly, he swept by me" begins with two heavy stresses, so the rhythm itself seems rigid. The next line, "Staring straight ahead strangely", piles up hissing s-sounds like a held breath. After that the verse loosens into long, unrhymed lines with no fixed pattern. Nothing chimes or settles, which fits a night where nothing resolves. The enjambment in "the fifth or sixth / Time that night" carries the reader over the line break just as the man keeps being carried back to the same spot, and the vague "fifth or sixth" suggests the speaker has been watching, and counting, for a while.
The turn comes with "Fearing for him, I followed". The speaker's motive looks like kindness, but it is hard to separate from curiosity or even from desire, and the poem does not settle which. What the line does show is the failure of good intentions. "Stung only further by my pity" is the sharpest phrase in the poem. Pity, which means to look down on someone, confirms that he has been seen at his lowest, and it is the one thing he cannot bear. The speaker has become a witness to the man's failure, and no help can come from a witness. The man's reply is the shortest sentence in the poem: "He would not stop."
The ending is as flat as a diary entry. "Since that night / I have not seen him again" stops without a moral or consoling image. The line break after "night" leaves that night hanging, and the plain, past-tense statement admits that the speaker will never know what happened to him. This silence is where the poem's real feeling shows. A man the speaker only half understood has stayed in his mind, and the guilt or regret of not having reached him is left unspoken.
The poem is significant because it refuses to flatter anyone. The speaker does not pose as a rescuer, the man is not made into a symbol, and the situation is not tidied into a lesson. In twelve plain lines it catches how loneliness, pride and compassion can all be present at once, and how they can fail to connect.