Nobody throws a party in this poem. The speaker wakes with an aching back and finds the flat empty ("Pat gone to class Ron to work"). Only then, almost as an afterthought, does he register that "its my birthday." The rest of the day is recorded with the flatness of a diary: a Pepsi for breakfast, a pill, three Greek lessons, a gift book, some reading. The central idea is that a birthday, a day when we expect to feel important, can show how small and unsteady a private life is. The poem suggests that this smallness, written down honestly, is worth making art from.
The construction does most of the work. There is almost no punctuation, so actions pile up in one breathless run: "go to ADAM'S buy a pepsi for breakfast come home drink it take a pill I'm high." The speaker never stops to reflect, and the sentence has no brakes. The line breaks add to this. Lines end on weak, unfinished words ("buy a," "take a," "(I"), so the page seems to chop the speech off at random instead of giving each line a shape. There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The only music comes from repetition, and from the small clumsy touch of "its" with no apostrophe.
The word "birthday" gives the first half its comic, slightly sad rhythm. "Birthday pants birthday shirt" sounds like a child dressing up for an occasion that never arrives. The one sign that anyone else has remembered is "birthday book (from Joe)." Even that gift leads to a quiet detail: Juan Gris, we are told, has a "real name," Jose Victoriano Gonzales. Perhaps the speaker lingers over it because he is unsure of his own public name and self. That is an interpretation, but the poem does stop to note it before the speaker drops the book "in the middle."
The poem is also frank about literary vanity. The speaker reads "all my poems," gloats "a little over new ballad," and skips the "old sonnets imitations of Shakespeare." Since the title places this poem inside a sequence called *The Sonnets*, the joke has an edge. This is a "sonnet" of nineteen unrhymed lines that refuses to imitate anyone. Then comes a roll call of Auden, Spenser, Pound, Stevens and Frank O Hara, followed by the line break that gives the poem its best moment: "I hate / books." The single word "books." sits alone, a sulk and a confession at once. Having read the great poets, the speaker is left feeling worse about himself.
After that the poem turns into a litany. "I wonder" opens seven sentences, and each one lowers the stakes or shifts the worry. First he wonders about women who might think of him (Jan, Helen, Babe), then about a man who "still dislikes me" and people who "talk about me secretly." Then he asks the big question, "if I'm too old." Right after that he asks whether he's "fooling myself about pills." The last two wonderings bring the poem down to "what's in the icebox" and whether anyone "bought any toilet paper this morning." The fridge and the toilet paper suggest he shares the place with Pat and Ron, and the poem treats them as no less pressing than age or addiction. The final "I wonder" even drops its "if," as though the speaker is too tired to finish the grammar.
That levelling is the poem's method. Fear of ageing, suspicion of his own habits, and the need for toilet paper all get the same plain tone and the same weight. The effect is bathos, but it feels truthful rather than mocking. Anxious minds do not sort their worries into grand and petty piles.
The poem matters because it will not dress itself up. Traditional sonnets reach for love, time and death, and this one finds them in a pill, a Pepsi and an empty flat. It lets a poet admit that he gloats, sulks and hates books while still being a poet. The speaker comes across as uncomfortably real, and the last line, about the toilet paper, may be the most honest ending a birthday poem could have.