Six lines, one sentence, and a title many readers will have to look up: "ovine" means "of or like sheep." Once you know that, the opening picture rearranges itself. The "we" who "walk till weary, all in wool" are a flock, dressed alike and drifting from "dinner after dinner" the way grazing animals drift from patch to patch. The poem never says who these people are or where they are. The evening outing, the ship and the spending suggest holidaymakers, but that is an inference, and the poem is stronger for leaving it open. Its subject is a life of consumption and routine, followed out of habit rather than choice. The speaker says "we," not "they," so there is no smug shepherd's-eye view. The mockery includes the one doing the mocking.
The sound of the opening line fits the tiredness it describes. "Walk," "weary" and "wool" share a soft, breathy w, and the line falls into almost perfect iambic tetrameter: "We WALK till WEAR-y, ALL in WOOL." It sounds like marching. The second line, "to DIN-ner AF-ter DIN-ner," keeps the beat but ends on an extra unstressed syllable, like a footstep that never quite lands. Repeating "dinner" wears the word down, much as meals blur together on a long trip. There is no rhyme scheme, only a faint echo between "wool" at the end of the first line and "afternoon" at the end of the fourth, the same vowel shortened and then stretched. By the third line the meter has gone slack. "Go see the ship" is flat and casual, an item on a schedule.
The ship is the poem's strangest image. The group goes in "the evening" to see a ship "sunk in the clear afternoon," and the two times of day don't match. One reading, offered tentatively, is that the sinking belongs to an earlier afternoon, so the visitors are consuming a past disaster as an after-dinner amusement. Another is that "sunk in" turns afternoon light into water, so the wreck lies submerged in brightness. Either way, "clear" is ironic. Everything is visible and nothing is understood. A ship is also a vehicle of departure, so a sunk one quietly suggests that escape has already failed.
The last two lines turn the poem toward economics: "money for money / and self for escaped self." The grammar of "X for Y" is the grammar of a trade, but the trades here go nowhere. "Money for money" gets back exactly what it gave, a transaction with no gain, which makes the whole outing look like spending for its own sake. The next line is longer and stranger. Swapping a "self" for an "escaped self" suggests people who travel to get away from themselves and come home with only the self that has already fled, absent and out of reach. The repetition that drives the poem, "dinner after dinner" and then "money for money," ends with "self," the one thing the flock seems to lack. The poem stops on that word without comment.
What makes "Ovine" worth reading is how much it does in so few words. "Ovine" is a cool, Latinate word set among plain ones like walk, wool and dinner, and it is the only place a detached observer's voice appears. The rest is simple report, which makes the accusation harder to dodge. The poem never lectures about consumerism or conformity. It gives a flock, a wreck and a ledger, and trusts the reader to see how they connect. Because the poem is one unbroken sentence, the reader is carried along in the same procession, and the realization about the "escaped self" arrives only when there is no time left to turn back.