Nobody in this poem goes anywhere. The speaker sits on a bridge in the rain, and the biggest decision on the agenda is which ship to pick. Yet by the last line a voyage has been launched, not on water but in speech. That is the poem's central idea: idleness is not the opposite of adventure but one of its workshops. The title, "Idler," sounds like a mild accusation, and the poem answers it by showing what an idle person might actually be doing.
Start with the setting. A bridge exists to get people across, so sitting on one is a small act of disobedience. The speaker occupies the in-between place and declines to finish the crossing. The poem never mentions the water below, but a ship in line three suggests it, and the speaker ends up with water above and below. Then comes the odd phrase "drinking rain." Nobody really drinks rain; it simply falls on you. The verb turns passivity into appetite, as if sitting with your face to the weather were a kind of meal. "Drinking" also carries a faint whiff of the tavern, and the idler's tipple is whatever the sky provides, free of charge.
"Choosing a new ship" shifts the tone again. Choosing is what we do at a market stall or a menu, a fussy, pleasurable act. The adjective "new" is easy to skim past, but it implies earlier ships, already chosen and already talked about. The speaker is a connoisseur of imaginary vessels, and the poem gives us no cargo, no destination, not even a name. The ship is only a subject waiting to be picked.
The final line is where the poem turns on a double meaning. "Set forth" belongs to the language of epic departures, the sort of phrase that launches expeditions. But "set forth" also means to state or expound, as in setting forth an argument. The ship is therefore both a vessel and a topic, and the grand verb is yoked to the humble "talk about," a phrase from pub conversation and porch yarns. The joke is a deflation: the speaker will not sail, only chat. Yet the poem quietly insists that this counts. Telling a ship into being is a kind of departure, and the poem we are reading is itself that ship, already under way.
The construction supports this. The poem is a single unrhymed sentence of seventeen words, and the lines run five, three, five and seven syllables. Line two, "drinking rain," is the shortest, a held breath or a gulp, and the last line stretches out as if the speaker had settled in to talk. The lines are light and loosely two-beat at first ("I SIT on a BRIDGE"), then widen into the looser "to SET FORTH and TALK aBOUT." There is no rhyme to close things neatly. Instead the poem ends on the small preposition "about," which loops back to "ship" two lines earlier and leaves the sentence hanging, with the ship drifting just out of reach.
Small sound patterns tie the lines together. The short *i* of "sit," "bridge," "drinking" and "ship" gives the opening a patter that suits the rain, while the long vowel of "rain" breaks the pattern for a moment. The grammar adds to the mood. "Sit" is the only plain finite verb, and the rest of the poem drifts along on participles, "drinking" and "choosing," which never finish their action. Nothing is completed, and that suits an idler's afternoon.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it carries in so little space. It has a character, a mood, a setting, a pun and a gentle joke at its own expense. It can be read as a wry self-portrait of anyone who spends more time imagining journeys than taking them, and perhaps, judging by the closing line, as a comment on the act of writing itself. It never lectures or defends idleness outright. It simply lets the idler sit in the rain and quietly launch a ship, which is a more persuasive argument than a lecture would be.