Most poems about writing talk about inspiration or struggle. This one, in four lines, reports a strange swap: the speaker fell into writing, and in exchange a statue was put up in his place. Now he spends his days working as the statue's detective. The tone is deadpan, like someone mentioning an odd but settled arrangement, and that calm is where much of the humour comes from. Everything strange arrives in the guise of routine: "A strange thing, how every day…"
The title sets the logic. A stunt double takes the falls so the star doesn't have to, and the poem's central word is "fell." The speaker has fallen, and something has been set up to stand in for him. Which of them is the double is left open. The statue might stand in for the living man, the way a monument stands in for a person. Or the speaker, who does the moving, looking and tumbling, might be the statue's stunt double, doing the risky work of living on behalf of something fixed in place. The poem never settles this, and the doubling is its main source of tension.
"I am private eye for a statue" is the most playful line. Dropping the article ("private eye," not "a private eye") gives it the clipped feel of noir narration. It also lets "I" and "eye" echo each other, so the speaker is literally an eye, lent out to something that cannot look around for itself. The contrast works neatly: a statue is public, fixed and silent, while a private investigator is secretive, restless and always collecting clues. The speaker's daily task is to look into a thing that never moves. Judging by the title and the idea of falling "to writing," it is tempting to read the statue as the written self, the public image that a writer leaves standing while the actual person goes about his business. The poem only hints at this, which is probably wiser than spelling it out.
"Set up" is the line's best double meaning. A statue is "set up" in a square, but in detective stories to be "set up" is to be framed. So the statue is both erected and possibly stitched up, and the speaker's investigation could be a search for who did it, or a defence. "In exchange" adds a bargain: the speaker gave something and got something back, though the poem doesn't say whether it was a fair deal.
The last line carries the most momentum: "to writing, to morrow, to bed." "Fell to" can mean "began eagerly," as in "fell to work," and it also means a plain drop. Each "to" is a landing, but the landings keep changing size. Writing is an activity, "to morrow" is a stretch of time, and "to bed" is a place. Splitting "tomorrow" into two words makes it a destination, a spot where the speaker can land. Read quickly, the line sounds like a lazy slide from work into deferral into sleep. That fits with the idea that this is a falling-off and not a heroic leap. The three short phrases, each led by the same small word, also create a falling rhythm that ends on the flat, soft word "bed."
The poem has no rhyme, and its rhythm is that of ordinary speech, loosely iambic in the first line and then loosening further. Yet sound still ties it together. "Strange" in the first line and "exchange" in the third share a sound across the gap, which quietly links the oddity of the situation to the bargain at its heart. "Statue" and "set" also begin with the same hiss, as if the object were being placed within the sentence itself. Short, plain words like "fell," "set," "bed" and "eye" keep the surface casual while the meaning underneath is odd and layered.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so small a space. It has a miniature plot of fall, swap, and aftermath, and a joke that turns into a real question about what writing does to the person doing it. Does the work you leave behind become something you must keep an eye on, almost like a stranger? The poem offers no answer. It leaves the image standing, a motionless figure and a watcher who never quite gets to the bottom of it.