The title sets a small trap. "Public servant" promises someone humble, dutiful and answerable to others. Then the speaker steps out in "coat and sword," like a man in costume from a much older century, heading toward "drums and other drums." The servant has become a performer, even a small warrior. The poem is nine short lines in a single unbroken sentence, and its humour and bite live in the gap between what the title promises and what the speaker actually does.
On the surface, an official in ceremonial dress goes out to face a crowd, who respond with "ugly faces." The last five lines turn inward, though. The audience does not know "the wine / where I kill the clock / that talked on / about business." Wine seems to stand for a private place or state, perhaps a refuge, a drunkenness, or simply an inner life the public never sees. There the speaker silences a clock that has been turned into a bore, a voice droning about "business." The central idea, as I read it, is a split between public role and private self. The official turns up for the ritual, but the act that matters to him happens somewhere the crowd cannot follow. "Kill the clock" twists the familiar phrase "kill time." He does not pass the hours but murders the thing that measures them, the working day itself.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines are short, running from three to about six syllables. That gives the voice a clipped, ceremonial swagger, like marching. The sound does a lot of the work. The opening is full of solemn, rounded vowels in "go forth," "coat" and "sword," which sound heroic. Then "drums and other drums" arrives with a comic thud. The repetition is almost a tautology, as if all public ceremony were the same noise over and over. Later the hard k sounds take over, in "making," "kill," "clock" and "talked." "Kill the clock" is the sharpest phrase in the poem, and "talked" echoes it a line later, as though the clock's chatter keeps ringing after the blow.
The line breaks matter too. "That talked on" ends on a dangling "on," and the thought spills into "about business," so the lineation stretches out the droning it describes. The poem's last word is "business," the flattest word available. The speaker has just killed the clock, yet the clock's subject still gets the final say. Whether that is a joke or a small admission that he cannot escape it entirely, the poem leaves open.
The diction pulls in two directions. "I go forth" sounds like a knight-errant or a proclamation, language too grand for an official with a job to do. "Vulgar" brings in the older sense of the common crowd, the *vulgus*, and the word is a sneer. A public servant who calls the public vulgar and ugly-faced is either snobbish or being gently ironic about his own snobbery. The "ugly faces" are childish grimaces, and they may be the crowd's real response or only how the speaker sees them. "Not knowing" is just as ambiguous. The audience may simply be ignorant of his private pleasure, or his private pleasure may be a way of shutting them out.
The poem is worth reading because it fits so much into so little space. In nine lines it manages pomp, contempt, secrecy and a small act of rebellion, and it never explains itself. It does not say whether the wine is freedom or evasion, or whether the speaker is a hero who has found a way to survive institutional life or a man who has stopped listening to the people he is meant to serve. The poem also makes the reader ask who the real audience is, the crowd making faces or the clock that has been killed. Its tone moves from the grandly ceremonial to the quietly mutinous, and that shift is a good lesson in how a short poem can say something large by leaving its central image unexplained.