Start with the title, because it plays a quiet trick. "Green house" in two words could be a house painted green, or it could be the glass structure where seedlings are coaxed through winter. The poem delivers a third meaning: an ordinary house that turns green from the inside, as the outdoors moves into the parlor. The title is a small sign that the boundary between indoors and out is about to go soft.
The poem has five lines and no full sentence in the usual sense. It sets two places side by side, "a rank yard" and "part green in my parlor," then arrives at a speaker who is "out / of land and pleased / to house the dirt." The poem doesn't say how the speaker came to be out of land, and it doesn't need to. Judging by the lines, the yard is overgrown and can no longer be what a yard should be, so the growing is carried inside. The central idea is contentment with less: a loss of ground becomes an occasion for welcome, not complaint.
Much of the pleasure lies in the word choices. "Rank" is a rich, slightly unruly adjective. It can mean overgrown and lush, but it can also mean foul-smelling or coarse, and the poem lets all of that hang there without apology. It is set against "parlor," an old-fashioned word for the tidy room kept for visitors. Putting a rank yard and a parlor in the same breath sets up a small comedy of manners. Something wild is being invited into the best room in the house. The phrase "part green" is pleasantly slippery too. It could mean the parlor is partly green, or that part of the green, a portion of the yard's growth, now lives indoors. Either way, the yard has been divided and shared out.
The line breaks make the speaker's situation unfold in stages. "Where I am out" reads at first as a plain location, as though the speaker were outside, in the yard. Only when the next line supplies "of land" does "out" turn into a statement of lack, the way we say we are out of milk or out of time. A single word changes direction across the line break, and that mirrors the poem's larger movement from outside to inside.
The sound is as carefully managed as the sense. There is no rhyme, and the poem is in free verse, but the vowels do quiet work. "Yard," "part," and "parlor" share a broad *ar* sound, so the rank yard and the parlor are linked by echo before the sentence links them in meaning. "Part," "parlor," and "pleased" repeat the *p*, which gives the middle of the poem a soft, popping, almost cheerful quality. "Green" and "pleased" share a long *ee*, tying the color to the emotion. The line lengths shape the rhythm as well. The first line is short, three syllables, and heavily stressed: "A RANK YARD." The second spreads out to seven, the longest in the poem, as though the green were sprawling into the room. Then the poem tightens into three short lines of about four syllables each, and the last, "to house the dirt," ends on a single hard syllable that settles like a pot set down on a floor.
That last line holds the poem's best idea. "House" is normally a noun, but here it is a verb, and the poem turns on this shift. The speaker's house stops being a thing to live in and becomes an act of hospitality. The object of that hospitality is "dirt," not "soil" or "earth," which would sound more dignified. Dirt is what we sweep out and wipe from our boots. The poem chooses the humblest word and then declares the speaker "pleased" to shelter it. "Pleased" is the only feeling named in the poem, and its understatement makes it believable. The speaker is not rapturous, only quietly satisfied.
What makes the poem worth reading is how well its form matches its subject. Having run short of land, the speaker makes do with a small space, and the poem makes do with five lines. It also suggests that what we call mess, whether a rank yard or a parlor with dirt in it, can be what makes a house a home.