Almost every line of "On the Contrary" does the opposite of what a reader expects, and it does so in a voice that never raises itself above a calm, deadpan statement. The speaker lists attitudes: what troubles them, what delights them, what deserves trust and what deserves fear. Each attitude is turned inside out. Taken together they read like a credo for someone who has decided that the sensible, comfortable view of the world is the one least worth holding. The title promises contradiction, and the poem keeps the promise.
The opening couplet sets the pattern. "The land troubles me, / and I am against the sea." Land is normally where we feel safe and sea is where we feel threatened, so the speaker's refusal of both leaves them with nowhere to stand. The wording is uneven in a telling way. The land merely "troubles" them, which is a private feeling, while against the sea they take a position, like a citizen declaring politics. These two lines also hold the poem's only rhyme, "me" and "sea." After that the rhyme vanishes. It is as if the poem offers one small gesture toward order and then abandons it, which suits a speaker who distrusts the ordinary.
The middle of the poem is its most vivid stretch. "I cry out at the sight of a ship" is an alarmed reaction to something harmless, and the next sentence goes further: the speaker hears "bullets go hissing overhead / in a transport of joy." The sentence is the longest in the poem, and it runs across a line break before the short phrase "in a transport of joy" lands at the end. The hissing of the *s* sounds makes the danger audible. "Transport" is a good word to find here. It means rapture, but it is also the word for a vehicle that carries things, and the ship has just sailed past. Joy and danger are fused so completely that the speaker does not seem to notice anything odd.
The poem then moves from outward events to the act of reading. "I perceive unknown letters / in familiar words" describes what happens when you stare at a common word until it looks foreign. Poets work by making that happen on purpose. The next line, "Strange things please me," is the plainest in the poem and almost childlike. After so much paradox, it simply states the principle behind it. The speaker likes strangeness because it wakes perception up.
Then comes the fool. "I put great confidence in the thoughts / of a thick-skulled fool." The insult is blunt, but the confidence is real. This follows an old habit of storytelling, in which the simpleton sees what clever people miss. It also fits the poem's logic: if the respectable view is wrong, the disreputable one may be right. The sentence is also built on a clash, since "great confidence" sits uneasily next to "thick-skulled."
The ending delivers the sharpest turn. "Ordinary business must be / not served but feared." The line break after "must be" holds back the surprise for a moment. We expect a duty, like "must be attended to," and what we get is the opposite. The *not… but* structure gives the line the force of a rule, and "served" and "feared" echo each other in sound while meaning opposite things, so one word seems to flip into the other. Business here probably means the routine of getting and spending. Judging by the earlier ship, which may carry cargo as well as danger, the poem may be hinting that commerce deadens attention. That is an inference, though, and the poem never says it outright. What it does say is that the daily grind is something to be afraid of rather than obeyed.
The poem's significance lies in how much it fits into twelve short lines. It has no regular meter and almost no rhyme, and its sentences are simple and declarative. Yet the accumulating reversals build a real argument about attention: that the strange, the foolish and the frightening can be more alive than the sensible. The speaker's calm is what makes the poem funny and a little unsettling, because someone this composed about gunfire and fools is clearly serious about it.