Five short lines, and the poem still manages a full turn from bold proverb to dry joke. It opens with a statement that sounds carved on a wall: "Gain and ache are the greatest guides." What follows is a small, deadpan demonstration of that claim, ending on a sly twist about what people choose to argue over.
The first line works like an aphorism, and its sound makes it feel true before we've thought about it. "Gain" and "ache" share the same long vowel, so they chime like a near-rhyme, while "greatest guides" repeats the hard g. The pairing is wide in meaning, too. Gain can be pleasure, profit or success, and ache is pain, loss or longing. Together they cover most of what happens to a body and a life. The rhythm is heavy and measured, with stress falling on nearly every important word, which gives the line the weight of something settled and not open to debate.
The next two lines show the principle at work. "We lay with women, being pretty handsome. / We went to bed, being somewhat ill." The grammar is strictly parallel: "We" plus a verb phrase, then "being" plus a condition. That repeated "being" makes each action sound like a reasonable excuse. The speakers lie with women because they are handsome, and go to bed because they are ill, as if circumstance simply decided for them. The pairing also maps neatly onto the opening line. Handsomeness and its rewards are the "gain," and illness is the "ache." Even the verbs shift in a telling way: "lay with" is erotic, while "went to bed" suggests the sickroom, though it might still carry a faint echo of the first line. The humour comes from the phrases "pretty handsome" and "somewhat ill." Both are hedged, understated, almost casual. Nobody here is dramatic about pleasure or suffering. Both are simply taken as facts of life, reported in the same flat tone.
Then comes the pivot. The word "afterwards" is slightly ambiguous, since it could follow either the lovemaking or the illness, or both, and that vagueness is part of the fun. What comes after is not reflection or regret but an argument: "disputing for and against / extemporary prayer." The line break matters. "Against" hangs at the end of the line, and we have to wait for its object. When it arrives, it is a piece of churchy, almost bureaucratic vocabulary. "Extemporary prayer" means prayer made up on the spot rather than read from a set text. The phrase sounds old-fashioned, and judging by its diction, the poem seems to be borrowing the voice of an earlier age, though the text alone doesn't say where that voice comes from.
The final image is quietly ironic. These speakers have just spent the poem being guided by appetite and ailment, living, so to speak, extemporaneously. Yet they end up quarrelling over whether improvised prayer is allowed. The phrase "for and against" also repeats the balanced structure of "gain and ache," so even their argument comes in matched opposites. The poem itself is a kind of extemporary utterance: brief, unrhymed, loose in its middle lines, with no obvious pattern except parallel phrasing. It practises the improvisation its speakers debate. The last line is also the longest word-group in the poem, six syllables in "extemporary" alone, and its length slows the ending, like someone settling in for a long, pointless discussion.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. It makes a serious claim, that experience in the body teaches more reliably than doctrine, and then undercuts its own solemnity without cancelling it. We can read the ending as a gentle mockery of people who argue about the correct form of prayer when life's real lessons arrive through pleasure and pain. We can also read it more kindly, as a picture of how people naturally turn their gains and aches into talk, belief and argument. The poem leaves that choice open, and the lightness of its tone is why it stays in the mind.