A man drinks in a tavern until he is overcome, and then he sees a unicorn from the king's hunt hanging in a church. That is the whole event, told in seven short lines. It is a small comic scene, but it also asks a larger question: what do we count as a true vision, and what does it cost to get one? The poem suggests that excess and revelation may sit closer together than a respectable person would like. The speaker is sick, drunk, and looking at something wonderful, all at once.
The opening line is the cleverest. "Ill with pleasure ill took" folds two meanings of the same word together. The speaker is made ill by pleasure, and he has also taken that pleasure badly, as when we say someone took the news ill. The next line repeats the word, "ill at the Salutation Tavern," and now it also hints at the phrase "ill at ease." Three "ill"s in two lines make the opening queasy and a little repetitive, like a mind circling the same lurch. The grammar is slightly bent too, with "ill took" in place of the natural "took ill," which gives the speech an old-fashioned, almost ballad-like stiffness. That stiffness makes the confession feel dry and unembarrassed.
"Salutation" is a name that does a lot of work. A salutation is simply a greeting, but the word also carries religious weight, since it is associated with the angel's greeting to Mary. I'd call that an inference from the word itself, not something the poem states. Even so, it plants a churchly echo in the least churchly place imaginable, so the final image of a church does not arrive from nowhere. The tavern has already been quietly dressed in sacred language.
The verbs shift in a way that is easy to miss. "I drank till overcome" is past tense and blunt, with no mention of what was drunk or how much. Then comes "and so see a unicorn," in the present. The word "so" makes the vision a consequence, and the move into the present puts us inside the hallucination as it happens. The speaker does not say he thought he saw a unicorn, only that he sees one. Drink here works like a door, and the poem walks straight through it.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme, and the lines are short, mostly a handful of syllables each, so the poem moves in hesitant steps, like someone choosing words carefully while unsteady. But the vowels quietly link the key moments. "Overcome," "hunt," and "hung" share a short, thudding *u* sound, so the drinker's collapse and the hunted creature's fate seem to belong to the same sound-world. "Hung" also sits oddly close to "ill," and the pair may suggest a hangover. I offer that as a possible echo, not a certainty.
The unicorn is the poem's most loaded image. It belongs to "the king's hunt," so it is a quarry, something beautiful that has been chased and caught. Then it is "hung in church." The verb suggests a tapestry or painting on a wall, but it also has the grim sound of a carcass or a trophy displayed. The poem never explains the connection, and the pieces invite a reading. A hunted, captured, displayed creature in a place of worship recalls how unicorns have long been read as symbols of Christ. Even without that tradition, the image sets power (the king), violence (the hunt), and holiness (the church) together in one mythical animal.
Then there is the last word, alone on its line: "again." It is ambiguous. The speaker may be seeing the unicorn again, or the unicorn may be hung there again, or this may be a routine, a drunken pilgrimage that repeats itself. Set apart as it is, the word lingers like an afterthought or a hiccup. It also changes the tone. What looked like one strange evening becomes a habit, and the vision becomes something the speaker returns to, perhaps knowing how he gets there.
The poem's title, "Sighting," is the language of birdwatchers and wildlife logs, which is a funny way to record a mythical beast. It treats the unicorn as a rare but real animal, spotted and noted. This is where the poem's significance lies. In a few lines it makes the reader unsure whether the speaker is foolish or privileged, since the vision is both a symptom and a gift. It keeps the tavern and the church in one frame and refuses to say which of them is the more truthful place to see something marvelous.