"Where to find good company?" It sounds like a casual question, the sort you might ask while looking around a half-empty room. The rest of the poem answers it with a deadpan joke that stings a little. The title tells us the speaker is drinking alone, and in five short lines we watch a lonely person build a crowd out of liquid, inheritance and a dead language.
The poem turns strange in its second and third lines. "My father's a pint of sack" is a flat statement, with no "like" or "as" to soften it. Sack is an old word for a strong, sweet wine, and it carries a whiff of the Elizabethan tavern (Shakespeare's Falstaff is its most famous devotee). So the father is reduced to a measure of drink. The poem doesn't say whether that means a family habit, a vanished parent or a tradition handed down, and it is more unsettling for leaving the question open. Then comes "and I a weak sea." The verb has dropped out, so the "is" from the previous line carries over, and the pairing reads like a riddle or a two-name family tree. The scale is the joke: the father is small but potent, a single pint, while the child is vast but watery. One reading is that the heir has grown enormous and lost the strength. A sea is also salty, which may hint at tears, though the poem never says so.
The last two lines bring a comic collapse. "I bark in Latin / at a dozen bottles of wine." To bark is to behave like a dog, but also like a sergeant or a bad-tempered schoolmaster, so the verb mixes helplessness with false authority. Latin adds learning and ceremony, and it is also a language nobody speaks any more. The speaker shouts in a tongue that cannot answer, at listeners that cannot hear. The line break helps the joke. "I bark in Latin" hangs for a moment as a complete, almost dignified thought, and then the audience arrives and it is glass. A dozen is a full case, but it is also roughly the size of a dinner party, and this is where the opening question gets its answer. There may be a quiet pun at work here too. "Company" traces back to Latin roots meaning someone you share bread with, and the speaker, with wine in place of bread, has no one to share it with.
The poem has no rhyme, and its rhythm is loose. Counting syllables roughly gives seven, seven, five, five and eight, so the lines tighten in the middle and then spread out again. "Weak sea" puts two heavy stresses side by side and slows the line down, as if the speaker were sagging. "Bark in Latin" is clipped and abrupt. The final line rolls through "dozen bottles" before settling on the single heavy syllable "wine." Sound links the lines as well. The long "i" in "pint," "I" and "wine" ties the father, the speaker and the drink together, so that the three seem to share one vowel as well as one liquid. Apart from the opening question, every sentence is plain and declarative, and that matching of calm tone and odd content is where the humor comes from.
The poem is significant for how much it implies in such a small space. It never uses the word "lonely" and never asks for sympathy. Loneliness is carried by images: a father turned into a drink, a self turned into a thin sea, and a voice performing for bottles. The humor works as a shield, and the reader laughs and then notices what the laughter is covering. The speaker is also both the sea and the barker, the only voice in the room, so even the "company" he invents is made out of himself. The question the poem opens with goes unanswered in the sense that matters, and the dozen bottles are only the answer he can reach.