A sea captain buttonholes the speaker, and the opening promises an old-fashioned yarn. "I met a sea captain / telling stories of slaves" sounds like the start of a ballad, and the title, "Talk like a pirate (2)", adds swagger and play. We expect chains and a ship's hold. What we get is a list of complaints that could belong to any modern city: people who "pay for the water they drink," who "eat on their feet," who are "all slaves to industry." The central idea is that slavery has changed its costume rather than vanished. A person can be legally free and still be owned by the need to earn, spend and keep moving.
The poem's construction is plain, and the plainness does a lot of work. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Most of the words are short and everyday, so the captain's talk sounds spoken. The colon after "slaves" acts as a hinge, and what follows is three lines opening with "how they," a repetition that makes the captain sound like a man counting points off on his fingers. The line lengths are uneven in a telling way. The longer lines (roughly nine syllables) carry the accusations about water, industry and crime, while "how they eat on their feet" is quick and clipped, as if the meal itself were rushed. The last line, "my head aching," is the shortest of all, only four syllables, and it lands like a dull thud after the long rolling complaint.
The imagery moves from the body to the system. Water is the most basic thing a person needs, and the poem presents having to pay for it as a kind of bondage. Eating "on their feet" is a small, vivid picture of people with no table, no chair and no pause. The phrase also quietly suggests they are never off their feet at all. Then the language turns abstract with "slaves to industry," and finally legal with "other work is counted a crime." That last line is worth slowing down for. The passive "is counted" names no judge or lawmaker, so the rule seems to have no author, like weather. If we take the title's pirate theme seriously (an inference, since the poem never says it), the captain may himself be doing the "other work": the outlaw trade. The only man who sees the system clearly would then be the one it has made a criminal.
The ending is the cleverest part. "I drank a great deal with him" echoes the earlier "drink," and the contrast is sharp. The workers must pay for water, while the speaker and the captain drink freely, and presumably something stronger. "A great deal" may even carry a faint pun on commerce. The headache is deliberately ambiguous. The participle "aching" floats loose, so we cannot tell whether it is a hangover, the strain of listening, or the throb of an uncomfortable idea. Readers who know Coleridge's Ancient Mariner may think of the Wedding-Guest, who leaves "a sadder and a wiser man." This listener gets no such tidy lesson, only a sore head.
That refusal to conclude is part of what makes the poem significant. The speaker never says whether the captain is right. The argument is handed to a character who tells stories and drinks, and who might be exaggerating. This matters because "slave" is one of the heaviest words in the language, and comparing everyday work to it can feel like an insult to those who suffered real slavery. By placing the claim in a sailor's mouth and keeping the speaker at arm's length, the poem lets the word provoke us without asking us to accept it whole. We are left to ask the questions the captain leaves hanging. At what point does a necessity become a chain? Who decides which work counts as honest and which as crime?
In eight short lines, the poem packs in a whole critique of how we live, and it does so through understatement and a good-humoured, slightly boozy voice. The numeral in the title hints that it belongs to a set, but it stands perfectly well alone. It makes its point the way a good storyteller does, by seeming casual and leaving the sting for later.