Few poems move from the cosmic to the vegetable as quickly as this one, and the jolt is the point. It opens with a grand apostrophe, "O infinity of papers," as if addressing a heaven made of documents, and asks it to "give a piece of me" to a surgeon, to soldiers, to a town. Eight lines later the speaker is calmly sitting with a cabbage. Between those two moments lies the poem's whole subject: how a person can be divided up, judged, used and recorded, and still go on wanting small, ordinary things.
The first three lines are a surrender. The speaker offers himself in pieces, and the three recipients are carefully chosen. The surgeon cuts, the soldiers consume, and the town judges. Each takes something different, whether body, labor or reputation. The town is the sharpest of them: it is where "I seem a dull heavy man." The verb "seem" matters. It admits a gap between the self and the self as others see it. The adjectives "dull heavy" are flat and weighty, with two stressed syllables that thud together, and they quietly prepare the title. A dull, heavy thing, round and pale and packed tight, is more or less a cabbage.
The pivot comes with the pun at the center. "I had a mind to some cabbage" uses an old idiom for feeling inclined toward something, but set beside the title "Cabbage Mind," it also makes the speaker's mind literally a cabbage. The phrase is funny and a little self-mocking, yet it is also tender. The dull man the town sees turns out to have appetites and a will, and he satisfies them at once: "I sent for some and had it." The verbs are as plain as verbs can be. Repetition drives the passage, with "had" returning in "had a mind" and "had it," and "some" sounding twice. The effect is of a mind going round a small satisfaction like a tongue around a pleasant taste. The sentences have a faintly old-fashioned, diary-like ring, as if someone were recording the day's small events without ornament. That is an impression from the diction rather than anything the poem states.
Then the tone turns again. "A strange thing how I am / already in the book / of rain and night." After the brisk, practical sentences, the syntax slows and the lines get shorter, and the poem seems to lose its footing on the word "already." The speaker is not saying he will be written down one day. He is saying it has happened. The word can be read as a calm acknowledgment of death, or of fate, or of being part of the natural order before one has finished living. Whichever reading one prefers, it echoes the "infinity of papers" from the first line. The book answers the papers, but it is a very different kind of record. Papers suggest the paperwork of surgeons, armies and towns, while this book is written in "rain and night." Those are elemental things, and rain is also what makes cabbages grow. The ending quietly joins the vegetable and the cosmos.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. Its rhythm is that of speech, which is why the long, rolling first line can give way to blunt statements without any sense of strain. Line length does a lot of the work. The opening stretches outward, the middle is compact and domestic, and the close dwindles to a four-syllable line, "of rain and night," that sounds like a door closing. The soft, open vowels there contrast with the clipped, hard-edged sounds of "dull heavy man."
What makes the poem worth remembering is its refusal to choose between the grand and the trivial. A lesser poem would either pose gravely about mortality or settle for a joke about vegetables. This one keeps both in the same breath and lets each unsettle the other. The cabbage keeps the big gestures honest, and the big gestures give the cabbage unexpected weight. The result is a portrait of a person who is spoken for by institutions and still manages to ask for his dinner, and who, perhaps because of that, can say "a strange thing" about his own place in the world without panic.