Six short lines, and the first makes a claim most poems would spend a whole page defending: "This morning too was art." Art here is not a painting or a finished object but a stretch of time, an ordinary morning. The little word "too" matters. It implies earlier mornings that were also art, so the poem opens in the middle of a habit, as if the speaker has been living this way for a while. The title, "Artist," then points back at whoever has been doing the living.
The next line changes direction: "a ship for a seal." It is the most puzzling image in the poem, and it resists a single reading. A seal needs no ship. It is already at home in the water, so a vessel built for it is both generous and absurd. Perhaps art is like that, a human-made container for something that was fine without one. The word "seal" also means a stamp of approval or a way of closing something shut, and a reader might hear that second meaning faintly behind the animal. That is an inference, since the poem never signals it, but the line's strangeness invites such guesses. What it does clearly is define art by comparison rather than explanation. Art is not like a ship; it simply is one, offered to a creature that doesn't need it.
Then the poem turns to a walk. "I walked back to where / I had long thought to live" is the plainest stretch of language here, and its plainness gives the strange images something to rest against. The speaker returns to a place once imagined as a future home. The colon after "live" is the hinge of the poem, because what follows is a verdict: "in error, like the bull / at home on foot." The grammar is slippery. The error could belong to the old belief that he would live there, or to the place itself, or to the act of walking back. The poem doesn't choose, and the uncertainty is part of its meaning.
The final comparison is stranger than it first looks. Bulls are heavy, hoofed animals, and "on foot" is a human phrase for walking, so the line gives the animal a small human dignity. A reader might think of the proverbial bull among fragile things, but the poem offers something gentler: a bull that is "at home" in its own clumsy way. That phrase echoes the earlier "where I had long thought to live," so the poem sets being wrong and being at home side by side, and they no longer cancel each other out. The speaker's mistake about where he would live may be a place he can still inhabit, as the bull inhabits its body. "On foot" also quietly matches "walked," so the bull becomes a double for the speaker, and the seal and the ship may be another pair, two things that do not quite fit and are joined anyway.
There is no rhyme, and the poem is in free verse, but sound still holds it together. The lines are brief and taper from six syllables down to four, so the last line, "at home on foot," lands softly and conclusively. The vowels in "bull" and "foot" echo each other, a small chime at the very end. Earlier, "art" and "error" share a root sound, linking the first and last sentences: art and error are neighbors here, and the poem treats them as nearly the same thing. The syntax moves from statement to image to anecdote to simile without any connecting argument, and the gaps are where the reader does the work.
The poem's significance lies in this compression. It does not tell us that art is mistakes, or that home is where we end up regardless of plans, but it makes both ideas feel plausible in under thirty words. For a student, it shows how a poem can think through images instead of explanations, and how an odd comparison, like a ship given to a seal, can mean more because it is left unexplained. It also offers a modest, appealing idea: that we may be most at home in the places we were wrong about.