The first two lines never say who is being addressed. A speaker, tired of living, has slumped "betwixt your arms," and only in line five does the poem name its confidant: "my table." The delay works well. By the time we learn the arms belong to a piece of wooden furniture, we have already felt them as a person's. Giving a table "arms" and a "top" borrows the language of the body, and it shows how little human comfort this speaker has left.
The central idea is loneliness and the failure of a substitute. Twice the speaker pretends: the table is "as if you were my lover's chest," then "as if you were his shoulders broad." Both similes depend on an absent person, and the shift from "my lover's" to the cooler "his" makes him feel further away the second time. The poem never says where he has gone or why, and it doesn't need to. His absence is the real subject, and the table only makes it more obvious.
The sound of the poem supports this. Its twelve short lines run to about eight syllables each, with a loose, swaying beat closer to a murmured lament than to strict metre. There is no regular end rhyme. Repetition does the work instead. "How many times... How many nights" opens two parallel lines, and "weary of life" and "dreary of life" echo each other so closely that the nights seem to blur into one. The lines pair up: the first two mirror the next two, and the two "as if" lines mirror each other. It feels like someone returning to the same spot again and again. The language wavers between old-fashioned and plain, with "betwixt" and a single "thee" among the ordinary "you"s. That "thee" arrives in "I gripped thee, in anguish so great," just as the feeling peaks, so the address becomes more intimate and prayer-like at the height of pain.
The third group of lines turns to physical verbs: "slumped," "gripped," "pressed," "raking with sobs." The speaker's body does everything and the table does nothing. Then comes the poem's hardest line: "Hard you were, silent to my woes." It is the only moment the table is allowed to be itself rather than a stand-in. "Hard" works twice, as a plain fact about wood and as a verdict on its lack of feeling, and "silent" names the one thing a table cannot help being. Putting "Hard" first makes the line land flatly, like a knock on timber. The speaker has known all along that the comfort was pretend, and the wood's honesty ends the game.
The ending changes the tone. "I leave you now; this note, my last" is calm and almost businesslike. Set beside the opening "weary of life," it suggests the speaker may be saying goodbye to more than the room. That is an inference, since the poem never spells it out. The poem is also headed "Trivandrum, 16.05.2009," like a dated letter, which suits the idea that the poem is itself the note. The final line, "Let not the winds sweep it off," is a small, practical worry, and that is what makes it so affecting. Whether it is aimed at the winds or at the table, it asks for something to hold the paper down, so that the words stay put and someone reads them. The table that stayed silent is asked, in effect, for one last service. Beneath that is the wish to be heard by someone who can answer.
The poem is significant for what it does with so little. It uses no grand abstractions, only an ordinary household object, a few gestures of the body and two borrowed images of a lover's chest and shoulders. Loneliness becomes something you can touch: the grain of the wood, the weight of a head, the press of a sobbing chest against a hard surface. It handles a very dark subject with restraint rather than melodrama, and it ends on the human wish to leave a message that will not blow away.