Nobody says "an ear of owl." The phrase sounds like "an ear of corn," as if the owl were a crop, something grown and gathered, and that small strangeness sets the tone for the whole poem. In five short lines, night arrives through the owl's hearing, and the arrival turns into something between a church service and a meal. The central idea is that hunting, for a creature like this, is both ritual and appetite, and that pain and love cannot be pulled apart inside it.
Start with the syntax. A plain sentence would read "Night fell into the owl's ear." Instead the poem inverts it: "Into an ear of owl / night fell." The destination comes first, so we enter the ear before we know why. Then "night fell," the shortest line, drops like a stone. Darkness here is not just something the owl sees (or doesn't see). It is poured into the organ owls rely on most when they hunt in the dark, so night becomes a sound, or a silence, delivered straight into the head. Dropping the article from "the owl's ear" also turns the bird from an individual into a substance, a kind of raw material, and that prepares us for the strange mixing of nature and ceremony to come.
Then comes "ecclesiastical," the longest word in the poem, alone on its line. The jump from blunt one-syllable words ("night," "fell") to a six-syllable church word slows everything down, almost like a bell struck once. The adjective floats without a clear owner. It might describe the night, the way it fell, or the owl itself, whose stillness and cowl-like feathers might suggest a robed figure (the poem doesn't say, so this is a guess from the imagery). That uncertainty is useful, because it spreads a churchy hush over the whole scene: vaulted dark, solemn timing, a sense that something is about to be performed.
The last two lines complicate the mood. "With great pain and love / for his supper" can be read in several ways. The owl may feel love for his supper, so that appetite becomes a kind of devotion. Or the night may fall with pain and love, as if darkness itself had feelings about what it was letting happen. "Pain" also quietly raises the question of whose pain it is: the owl's, the prey's, or both. Putting pain and love side by side, and giving them to a predator, refuses the comfortable view that nature is either cruel or kind. Here it is both at once, and with the same intensity ("great").
Notice, too, how "supper" works after "ecclesiastical." It drops the register from cathedral to kitchen table, a homely, almost comic word. But in a poem already dressed in religious language, "supper" can't help carrying a trace of the communion table, where eating is a sacred act and something is given up so that others may be fed. The poem never says this outright. It lets the two meanings sit in one word, with the soft, two-beat landing of "supper" closing the poem quietly rather than with a flourish.
Formally, the poem is free verse: no rhyme and no steady meter, just uneven lines held together by one sentence and a few commas that act like breaths. Sound does some of the binding instead. The liquid *l* recurs in "owl," "fell," "ecclesiastical," and "love," giving the poem a low, murmuring texture that suits an evening scene. The line breaks control the pace, making us wait for "night fell," linger on the big word, and then rush slightly through the last two lines to the meal.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it carries in so few words. It gives us a hunting bird without cuteness or horror, and it asks us to hold tenderness and killing in the same thought. It also shows how a single odd phrase and a single borrowed word, "ecclesiastical," can change the way we see an ordinary event. After reading it, nightfall looks less like the end of the day and more like something that is being served.