Six lines, one sentence, hardly any punctuation, and yet "Burden" feels crowded with traffic. A carrier carries goods to another carrier, a pocket is carried inside a pocket, and the whole day is bracketed by a lute in the morning and a flute after supper. The central idea sits in the title, which in English means two things at once: a load to be hauled, and the old musical term for a refrain, the chorus that returns after every verse. The poem is about carrying, and it carries by repeating.
Its sound is built on that repetition. The only true end-rhyme is "lute" and "flute," first line and last, and the two lines share almost the same rhythm: "In the morning at my lute," "after supper at my flute." They work like the two ends of a strap holding a bundle together. Inside that frame the poem chimes with its own words rather than with rhyme. "Carrier" appears twice, "carry" twice, "pocket" twice. The second line, "the carrier will carry to the carrier," is the longest at twelve syllables, and its rocking, near-identical syllables read like a heavy walk. Line four, "sake and sack, lamb and veal," is the shortest. Its goods are packed in tight pairs, with the alliteration of *sake* and *sack* snapping them together.
The cargo is a small feast: fruit, drink, meat. The strangest item is "two barrels of sun." Sunlight can't be barrelled, so the phrase has to be figurative. Coming straight after "oranges," it reads like a gloss on them. The oranges are little suns, and the barrels hold more of the same warmth, perhaps the sunshine stored in fruit and wine. "Sake" and "sack" are two drinks from different traditions, a Japanese rice wine and an old English word for a strong white wine. "Sack" is also an ordinary word for a bag, so even the name of the drink is a container. "Lamb and veal" are both young animals, which gives the abundance a slight shadow. That is an inference, and the poem never presses the point.
The speaker, meanwhile, does none of the work. The "I" appears only as a possessive, "my lute," "my flute," and the only action we see from the speaker is playing music. All the verbs of effort belong to the carrier. You can read this as a comfortable master watching others haul his supper. You can also read it the other way, with the music as the true freight of the day, carrying the carrier from morning to evening. The poem doesn't choose, and its refusal to choose is part of its charm.
The ending adds a final twist: "a pocket to carry in his pocket." A pocket is already a place for carrying things, so the carrier is asked to carry a container inside a container. After barrels and whole animals, the burden shrinks to something that almost vanishes, and the language folds in on itself like nested boxes. The delivery has the same feeling. Goods travel "to the carrier," not to any recipient, so we only ever see a relay, one pair of hands passing to another. Nothing arrives, and nobody eats the supper we hear about. The poem skips the meal and leaves its ingredients permanently in transit.
What makes "Burden" worth reading is how neatly its form matches its subject. It has the bounce of a nursery rhyme or tongue-twister, where sound seems to lead sense, but the sense keeps catching up: work and music, heaviness and play, the huge (barrels, sun) and the tiny (a pocket). The title does its job twice over. The repeated words are the weight, and the repetition is also the song, the refrain that keeps coming back around. In six short lines the poem is both the thing carried and the tune that makes the carrying bearable.