Six short lines, and the poem digs in three directions at once: down into the earth, inward into the body, and outward toward a landscape the speaker has not yet reached. The title introduces a voice more than an animal. A mole speaks, and everything it says is hungry.
The first line plays on an idiom. To "go to ground" is what a hunted creature does, so it sounds like retreat, even cowardice. For a mole, though, ground is simply home. The poem keeps both meanings alive and then shifts the sense of the retreat: the speaker is "ready to break / the gray clock." The line ends on "break," and the sentence hangs over the white space before the clock arrives, so the reader pauses just where something is meant to snap. What the "gray clock" is, the poem never says. It could be the dull, repetitive passing of time, or the colourless light before morning, since days "break" too. It might even be a dandelion clock, the gray seed-head that falls apart when blown, which would suit an animal shoving up through grass and soil. The poem does not choose, and that openness is part of its pleasure. Whichever reading you pick, gray is the only colour here, and the speaker wants to smash it.
"My mouth is a warren" is the strangest image. A warren is a maze of tunnels, and the mole's own mouth becomes one: hollow, dark, branching, mostly empty space waiting to be filled. It is also where speech comes from, so the voice we are hearing seems to come up a burrow. The statement is flat and present-tense, and it follows the past tense of "went." The poem's grammar then moves on again to the imperative, "Bring me a field." It travels from what was done, to what is, to what is demanded. The command is bold for an animal that lives underground, but the speaker wants open land and specifies "a bitter plain." Bitterness is part of the order.
The sound of the poem backs up this appetite. Long *a* sounds run through "break," "gray" and "plain" and link the clock to the landscape that will replace it. Hard *b* sounds, in "break," "Bring," "bitter" and "bezzle," give the second half a spitting, plosive energy. "Bezzle" is the most unusual word. It is an old relative of "embezzle," with senses of squandering and guzzling, and it is rare enough now to feel dug up, as if it had been sitting in the soil. To "bezzle in" a plain is to gorge and wallow in it, so hunger turns into greedy excess.
The last line holds the poem's sharpest idea: "fear rank as wine." "Rank" can mean foul-smelling, but it can also mean thick and overgrown, as in rank grass. Wine is something we savour and let ferment. The simile therefore joins disgust to pleasure. The speaker does not ask to be spared fear but to taste it, strong and heady. For a creature built for dark, enclosed safety, asking for an exposed plain and its terrors is a risk it wants to take. The final word, "wine," also ends on a soft, lingering vowel after all those hard consonants.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The line lengths do the shaping. Two longer lines of about eight syllables, the first and the fifth, bracket shorter ones, and the tiny "the gray clock" sits alone on its line like a small object waiting to be broken. The short lines make the poem feel compressed, like something coiled in a tunnel.
The poem is significant because it takes a creature that proverbially stands for blindness and obscurity ("blind as a mole") and gives it a sharp, greedy, defiant voice. Its central idea is that withdrawal need not be surrender. Going underground can be a way of gathering strength, and what comes next is not comfort but a harsher, more vivid life than the gray one the speaker is leaving.