"O mouth" is how the poem begins, with the grand "O" of a classical ode. But what is being addressed is no muse. It is the part of the body we eat, talk and kiss with. In two words the poem sets up both its joke and its argument: the mouth is where food and love meet, so a poem about pudding can also be a poem about desire.
The second line plays up the mock-grandeur: "we set sail on a fine pudding." A dessert becomes a ship, or perhaps the sea itself, and an ordinary supper turns into an expedition. The "we" arrives before we know who is speaking or who is with them, which gives the line a slightly giddy, swept-along feel. The domestic details come next: the pudding was "made by a cook and an oven / which both please me." The grammar is quietly funny here. "Which" is normally used for things, so the cook gets lumped in with the appliance, as if person and oven were equally kitchen equipment. Yet the verb "please" is warm, and the oven's heat prepares the ground for the physical tone of the ending.
The most interesting moment is the line break after "the first." Because it follows "a cook and an oven," we briefly read "the first" as pointing back to the cook, the first of the two things that please the speaker. Then "time" arrives and the phrase rewires itself into "the first / time I ever saw my wife." The dash that follows doesn't complete the thought. The poem swerves instead. Supper and first sight of the wife are folded into one moment, and the poem never says whether she was the cook. It lets us suspect it. Courtship, cooking and marriage blur, so that the timeline of the romance matters less than its flavour. The syntax has a stitched-together, collaged feel, as if the sentences keep sliding into one another. The text alone can't tell us how the poem was made, but the effect is of someone too happy, or too hungry, to finish a sentence tidily.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are uneven, and the poem works through sound and shape instead. A chain of long "i" sounds runs through the middle: "fine," "I," "time," "my," "wife." It hums like a note held under the words and ties the pudding to the memory of the wife. The soft, rounded words "pudding," "cook" and "oven" give the kitchen a cosy sound. The lines also shrink as they go. The long, rolling second line tapers to "we fell," just two words, and then to "to oyster bed." "Fell" sits alone on its line, and the reader drops with it.
That ending is the poem's cleverest stroke, because each word is doing double duty. "Fell to" is an old idiom for beginning a meal eagerly, but "fell" also suggests falling in love and falling into bed. "Oyster bed" is literally the seabed where oysters grow, which brings back the sailing image, so the voyage ends on the sea floor. But oysters have long been thought of as an aphrodisiac, and "bed" is hard to read innocently. The missing article matters too. "To oyster bed" sounds clipped, nearly like "to bed," so the sentence rushes to its destination without ceremony. The meal and the bedroom arrive in the same breath.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so few words: a feast, a first meeting, a marriage, a sea voyage and a pun on appetite. It is funny without being dismissive of its subject, and sensual without being coy. Its main lesson for a student reader is that meaning can come from slippage as much as statement. A line break can make us misread a phrase, and a bent sentence can make two meanings fit. The poem treats eating and loving as the same hunger, and it leaves the reader, like the speaker, a little breathless.