Nothing much happens in «Drunkenness 1», and that is exactly the point. William Corbett gives us no party, no quarrel, no dramatic collapse. Instead he gives us the leftovers of an evening: stains, scraps, a few dim lights. Only in the last lines does a different kind of subject surface, which is a quiet regret about the life the speaker has not had.
The opening line sets the tone by joining two things in one phrase: "Drunkenness and the street lights." The "and" doesn't separate the state from the scenery. It blurs them, as if the drunkenness were simply part of how the lights look. What follows keeps that blur going. There are "spots on the walls" and "dim lights wavering up the stairs." The word "wavering" belongs to the lights, but it also describes the uncertain person climbing past them. We never get a plain statement like "I was drunk." The condition is shown through a wobbling view of the world.
The details then grow smaller and shabbier. The napkins are "crumpled / smeared with Chinese port sauce," and the line ends on the flat aside "but that was earlier." That little phrase does a lot. It shows a mind that has lost its place in time, with a meal already stranded in the past and the evening split into before and after. (Judging by the word "port," the sauce may even carry a faint hint of the drink itself, though that is only a guess.) Then the eye drops to "the gutter," where "sickly yellow-green / ailanthus leaves" have fallen. The colour is exactly the colour of nausea, and the movement of the poem has gone from climbing stairs to staring at the ground. The ailanthus is a tree that grows readily in city streets, so the setting stays urban, unglamorous and close to the pavement.
Then the poem turns, and it does so without warning. "Lovely those people / who make no demands / not friend nor family." The inverted phrasing, with "Lovely" put first, sounds like something said aloud, half to oneself. The missing punctuation lets the thought slide along. Who are these people? The poem doesn't say. The line "not friend nor family" suggests they are strangers, such as passers-by or the anonymous lit windows of a street. The speaker finds them lovely precisely because they ask nothing of him. It is a lonely compliment, and drunkenness seems to have loosened his guard enough to admit it.
The final sentence follows a strange logic. "After all I never bicycled / through France in my late twenties / so never knew that sweet anticipation / of a life to come." The "after all" pretends to be an explanation, but the connection to the previous lines is emotional rather than logical. A bicycle trip through France stands for a particular kind of youth, one that is open-ended and moving forward under its own power. Against the wavering lights and the gutter, that picture is almost painfully clear. The repeated "never" ("never bicycled," "never knew") sounds like a small, steady toll. The word "sweet" also stands out after "sickly," as if the poem has swung between the two ends of taste. The speaker misses not the trip itself but the feeling of expecting something good from the future.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular beat. The short lines and uneven breaks make the reading slightly unsteady, which suits the subject. Most of the punctuation falls away, and the poem ends with no full stop after "to come," so the sentence trails off into the very future the speaker feels he missed.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. Drunkenness could easily have been played for comedy or for melodrama, but here it works as a lens that blurs the surface and lets a plain truth through. The poem doesn't explain or excuse the speaker. It lets a few stains, some fallen leaves and one admission do the work, and the admission lands harder because everything before it was so offhand.