The title of "Retiring" does several jobs at once. To retire is to leave work, to go to bed, to withdraw from company, and a retiring person is shy. Dave Bonta's six lines hold all of these meanings at once. The poem's central idea is that the speaker has retreated from life into a small, safe, lonely existence, and he knows exactly what that safety has cost him.
The poem is built from three two-line stanzas with no rhyme and no punctuation, though the opening capital "I" is the one concession to convention. The short lines make the first two stanzas sound hesitant, as if the speaker is edging toward each confession. Notice that the first two stanzas begin with the same small word: "too afraid," then "too late." "Too" always signals a limit, and it marks two kinds of failure. The first is a failure of nerve and the second a failure of timing. Fear comes first and lateness follows, which suggests the second is the result of the first.
The first stanza is the most ambiguous. "I am too afraid / of any vice" could mean the speaker fears vice as a moral danger. But it can also mean he is too timid to indulge in any vice at all, and the poem's mood makes the second reading more convincing. The word "any" is bleakly total. It is not that he avoids the grand sins; he has no appetite for even the small ones. What looks like virtue is really cowardice, and the speaker seems to see through it. (A vice is also a tool that clamps things tight, a meaning the poem never mentions but that fits a man gripped by his own caution.)
The second stanza turns toward another person, though the poem refuses to say who. "Too late to give her / that old gone heaven" leaves out any subject for the sentence, so the grammar itself feels incomplete, like a thought that fades. "Her" is never explained, and the poem suggests only that she is someone for whom he once could have provided something. The phrase "old gone heaven" is the most striking in the poem. Heaven is normally a future reward, yet here it is already in the past. "Old" can mean former, but it also means aged, as the speaker is. "Gone" sits oddly between the adjective and the noun, which gives heaven the sound of a person who has died. The line suggests that happiness, or perhaps desire, has been lost like a person.
The last stanza shifts tone. The lines grow longer, and the diction becomes domestic: "I dine on a breast of mutton." "Dine" is a slightly grand verb for a plain meal, and the mismatch is gently comic. Mutton is the meat of an older sheep, tougher and plainer than lamb, so even the dinner is aged. The word "breast" is the most loaded in the poem. Set directly after the lost "heaven" and "her," it is hard not to hear a trace of the body the speaker no longer touches. Whether Bonta intends this or not, the pun turns a meal into a substitute for intimacy. That is an inference from the placement of the words, but the poem seems to invite it.
The final line, "all alone in the dark," has a gentle, almost nursery-rhyme lilt, with the stresses falling on "lone" and "dark." After the broken phrases earlier, it sounds settled and final, like a door closing. The long "o" of "alone" lingers, and the echoing "all" and "alone" make the loneliness feel doubled. The darkness can be literal, as in a room with no light, but it also suggests the end of life, or at least a life lived without seeing clearly. He cannot even see what he is eating.
What makes the poem significant is how much regret it packs into so little space, and how it manages to be both funny and sad. There is no self-pity in the language, only flat statement, and that understatement makes it more affecting than any lament would be. The speaker does not cry out. He eats his supper, and the poem lets the reader feel what that supper means.