Nothing much happens in these four lines, and that is where the pleasure starts. A man at his office has had too much wine, and he looks up to find his own hat in front of him. The title, "Apparition," promises a ghost, and what arrives is headwear. Yet the poem treats the sighting as a small miracle, because drink has made something familiar look like a find: "like money in the street."
The central idea is about how estrangement can feel like luck. The speaker doesn't say "I notice my hat" or "my hat is on the desk." He says "I see my hat before me," as if it had turned up uninvited, an object with its own presence. A hat is what you put on to leave the building, so this one carries the hope of escape. The wine has loosened the speaker's hold on the workday and, along with it, his sense of what belongs to him. He greets his own property the way a stranger would greet a banknote on the pavement.
That simile is the poem's best move. Money in the street is the happiest kind of money, unearned and unexpected, and it is the opposite of what an office produces. In a place organized around earning, the speaker's real wealth is a hat, which stands for the street, the walk home, and the end of the day. The comparison also pulls the outdoors into the room. "Street" is the last word, so the poem ends outside the building where it began, and the reader leaves with the speaker's wish.
The construction is as spare as the scene. The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are short, running by my count between five and seven syllables (seven, five, seven, six), which gives the poem a hush, like something said under the breath. Within that looseness there are quiet sound-echoes. "Wine," "I," and "like" share a long *i*, so the drinking and the speaker's own self-regard are tied together by sound. In the last two lines, "see," "me," and "street" chime on a long *e*, which gives the sentence a small lift and softly links the seer, the thing seen, and the place where it lies.
The syntax matters too. The poem opens with a participial phrase, "having drunk / a great deal of wine," and the grammar is oddly formal, almost like a report. "A great deal" is the language of memos and accounts, and it understates the situation so politely that it becomes funny. The speaker offers his drunkenness as a neutral piece of background, like a clerk noting the weather. The line break after "drunk" adds to the effect: the word hangs there for a moment before "a great deal of wine" arrives to explain it, so the confession and its excuse are split across two lines. Also notice that "I" doesn't appear until the third line. The first two lines have a speaker who is only a condition, someone who has drunk. He becomes a person, a seeing one, only when the hat appears.
The word "apparition" does a lot of work in this setting. A ghost usually appears to the grieving or the guilty, and here it appears to someone slightly tipsy at his desk. The mismatch between the grand word and the humble object is the poem's joke, but the joke has a point. Drink, like grief or fear, can make the ordinary strange, and in this case the strangeness is pleasant. The poem doesn't moralize about drinking at work or mock the office. It stays with the image and lets it be both funny and a little wistful.
What makes the poem worth reading is its compression. In about twenty words it gives us a place, a state of mind, a symbol, and a joke, and it doesn't explain any of them. Its closest relatives are the epigram and the short image-poem, forms that depend on one comparison landing exactly right. Here it lands because it is so unexpected and so apt. The poem is also a reminder that a good image doesn't have to be lofty. A hat in a drunken glance can look as valuable as a coin on the pavement, and a reader who has ever been bored in a room and longed for the door will recognize the feeling.