"Stewardship" reads like a dream that keeps changing its mind. It opens with a strange question: before the mouth, before speech or hunger, who owned me? The speaker seems to be asking where identity comes from before language shapes it. Then comes an act of destruction, as "we" burn the marsh and the swallow, a wild place and a living creature. Something about that "we" suggests shared guilt, as if the title's idea of caretaking has been turned upside down.
The next lines get stranger. Speech is "full of false Latin," a kind of fake authority, and the anchor is only a salt-cellar, something far too small and domestic to hold anything steady. The poem seems to be saying that our tools for managing the world are flimsy or pretended.
The ending shifts tone. Horses running to the sea at evening is a wide, beautiful image, but it's hard to say whether it feels like freedom or loss. The mood is uneasy, dreamlike, and quietly mournful.