Six short lines, one dry joke, and a bruise underneath it. The title promises a host, a starving artist, and a party, and the poem shows how he pulls it off with the only equipment he has. "With my paint I make a tavern, / fish, a dinner." The verb "make" sounds almost godlike, but the tool is paint, so the tavern, the fish and the dinner are all pictures. A hungry man conjures plenty the one way he can. The central idea is that imagination can build the setting of abundance but not its substance, and the only thing the evening leaves behind is something real: an ache.
The first lines are worth slowing down for. "A tavern, / fish, a dinner" is a ragged list, the little word "a" dropping out in the middle as if the speaker were adding items as fast as they occur to him. The menu is humble, too. He doesn't paint a roast or a banquet, just fish, and the line break lets that single word sit alone on its line. The tone is breezy, even boastful, as though conjuring a feast were no trouble at all. That confidence is what the poem is about to undercut.
The turn comes with "And fine company:", where the colon works like a drumroll before the guests are announced. What follows is a deflation: "wine together with wine." The phrase "together with" belongs to invitations and polite introductions, so the formal language makes the emptiness funnier. The guest list is the same thing twice. Sound plays its part as well. "Fine" and "wine" chime across the line break, the poem's only near-rhyme, and it gives the line the pleasant clink of a toast while the content stays hollow. Then the pattern is repeated, and we can hear where it is going before it arrives: "my head troubled with my head." The company has shrunk from guests to drink to the self, a mind keeping itself company. "Troubled" suggests worry, and it also suggests agitation, a head stirred up and arguing with itself. For an artist short of money, those worries are easy to imagine, though the poem never names them.
The ending leaves a question open. If the wine is painted, it cannot intoxicate, yet the head aches "all night." Is this a hangover from imaginary drink, the gnawing of hunger, or plain worry? The poem doesn't choose, and each reading is both funny and sad. The grammar adds to the uncertainty, because "aching" attaches loosely to the whole sentence, so it could describe the head, the speaker or the party itself. The party lasts only as long as the pain does.
In form, the poem is free verse with no rhyme scheme. The lines run from roughly eight syllables down to four, swell in the middle ("my head troubled with my head" is the longest stretch since the opening), and then drop into the short, flat final line. That shape mimics the evening: a burst of invention, a crowded middle, a sagging finish. Repetition does most of the work, in "wine… wine" and "head… head", and each doubling sounds like company while really being solitude. The vocabulary is plain and mostly one syllable, with words like "paint," "fish," "wine," "head" and "night," which suits a table with almost nothing on it.
The poem is significant for how much it compresses into so little space. The old image of the poor artist could easily have been told with self-pity, but this speaker plays host with a straight face and lets the comedy carry the pain. The poem also says something about art itself. Paint can make a room appear, but it cannot fill a stomach, and yet the ache at the end is real, so the made-up party has real consequences. The poem performs the same trick it describes: with a handful of words, and not much else, it builds a tavern, a dinner and a crowd, and then shows us that the crowd is one person awake in the dark.