Five short lines, and already a small act of surgery. The speaker takes his own head and puts it away, the way you might shelve a tool that has become dangerous, and then goes out for a walk. The tone is calm and practical, and that calm makes the situation strange, funny and, after a second look, a little sad.
The title sets up the joke. "Treatment" promises something clinical, a prescribed remedy, and the remedy turns out to be removing the organ that does the thinking. The only justification comes tucked between dashes: "for I am ill." It sounds like an excuse given to a doctor, or to a host when you leave a party early. The dashes interrupt the sentence the way illness interrupts a life, and they also keep the explanation small and apologetic, almost an aside.
The central image is "this arson." Arson is not just fire but fire set on purpose, so the head is doing something, not merely suffering. Notice, though, that it is called a "friend to this arson," an accomplice rather than the arsonist itself. The poem never says what is burning. It might be anxiety, obsessive thinking or a fever, and the word "this" drops us into a blaze already underway without naming it. What the poem does make clear is the relationship. The mind has been loyal to the fire, the way a bad friend is loyal, and the speaker has decided to part company with it.
The pronouns tell the same story. The head begins as "my head," something owned, then becomes "his absence." In four lines it has turned into a separate person who has been sent off. "Put away" also carries darker echoes, since people can be "put away" in prisons or institutions, so the head is quietly treated as a culprit being locked up. The word is gentle on the surface and faintly sinister underneath.
The form is free verse, with no rhyme and short lines of roughly four to seven syllables. The longest line, "and walk to see how things are," is the one that describes walking, and it stretches out like a stride before the poem shortens again to "in his absence." The line break after "are" lets "how things are" stand briefly as a bare fact before the final phrase qualifies it. The sounds also connect ideas. "Head" and "friend" share a short e, and "ill," "things" and "his" echo one another. "Arson" and "absence" both open with a broad a and carry a hissing s, so the problem and its supposed cure are tied together by sound. The two main verbs, "put" and "walk," are plain, one-syllable and physical, and they sit against the violent metaphor of fire.
The poem's logic is also impossible, which may be its cleverest feature. The speaker walks "to see," yet he has just put away his head, and the eyes would have gone with it. The poem seems to suggest that whatever goes out to look at the world is not the thinking, burning part of him. The "I" is split in two: the one who is ill and the one who is merely present and curious. Perhaps that is the real treatment, discovering that something remains when the mind's commentary is switched off.
The ending is deliberately unfinished. The poem stops on "absence," before the walk reports anything back. We are not told whether the world looks better, or only quieter, or lonelier without its usual narrator. The phrase "how things are" is neutral. The speaker is curious, not triumphant, and "absence" can mean relief or loss. The poem leaves both possibilities open.
That openness is where its significance lies. In five lines it turns a feeling many people know, the wish for a break from one's own mind, into a small, dark fable. It does not describe symptoms or explain itself. It offers one outlandish image, a few precise word choices and a walk, and it trusts the reader to supply the rest.