The first word of "Initiation" is "Let," and it sets the temper of everything after it. Nobody in this poem fights death, wails at it, or bargains with it. The speaker gives permission, as if standing at a graveside and quietly telling the world to stand down. The dead man may "continue in the ground," and that verb is the first surprise. We expect the dead to stop, to be finished. Here he continues, as though burial were a stage in a journey rather than its close. The title starts to make sense at this point. An initiation is a passage into something, and the poem imagines death as an entry into a new condition with its own company.
That company arrives in the middle of the poem. The ground is a place "where all things hurry," a startling phrase, since earth is usually the stillest place we can picture. Yet it works, because everything alive is heading there, and the speaker sees the grave as a destination crowded with arrivals. These arrivals are "a strange company / who seem to speak." The poem is careful here. They only *seem* to speak, so the living cannot be sure what the dead say, or whether it is speech at all. The dash before "a strange company" also loosens the grammar. We cannot quite tell whether the company is the hurrying things, the dead, or both, and that blur gives the passage a dreamlike quality.
Then the poem turns back to the living world and its institutions. A purser is a ship's officer in charge of money and provisions, and clerks keep ledgers, so these are people of tallies and totals. "Make up their accounts" works in two ways. It means to add up figures, and it also suggests settling a reckoning, an old way of thinking about the end of a life. The speaker does not mock them. They are simply told to carry on, but their sums look small beside the "strange company" just described. The parson is told to "rest," the word most often wished on the dead. He is invited to sit down beside the man in the ground, his words not needed. The poem is calm about this, and it pointedly offers no sermon or promise of heaven.
The form supports that calm. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only short lines of two or three strong beats. The nearest thing to an echo is the soft unstressed ending shared by "hurry" and "company," which chime without quite rhyming. Rhythm shifts with meaning. "Where all things hurry" moves quickly, while "the great night come" slows into three heavy syllables in a row. The line breaks do quiet work too. "In the ground, he" leaves the pronoun dangling at the line end before we learn he is dead, and "the parson rest, and" stops on a conjunction like a held breath before the last image. The vocabulary is plain and mostly short, but words like "purser" and "parson" give the poem an old-fashioned, almost liturgical air, as if it were a blessing spoken from an earlier century.
That blessing ends on its best move: "the great night come / to sit with night." The word repeats, but the scale shifts. The first "night" is the dead man's own darkness, and the second is something vast. "To sit with" is the language of a vigil, of someone keeping watch beside a sickbed or a coffin. So darkness itself becomes the mourner, and it is the only mourner the poem allows. Like keeps company with like, and the dead man is not abandoned but joined.
That is where the poem's significance lies. In eleven lines it refuses both despair and easy comfort. It does not say the dead man lives on in heaven, and it does not say he is simply gone. It says he continues, among a crowd we cannot hear properly, while the business of the living goes on above him. The title leaves one question open: whose initiation is this? The dead man's is plain, but by the final line the reader has also been walked to the edge of that ground, and the poem works like a rehearsal for a stillness we will all enter.