Five short lines, no capital letters, not one comma or full stop, and above them a title that sounds as if it swallowed a dictionary. "Grandiloquent" means speaking in a lofty, inflated way, yet nothing in the poem's own voice is inflated. It is small, plain, almost muttered. So the title works as a joke at the speaker's expense, or perhaps a confession. The grandiloquence lies in the ambition of the head the poem describes.
That head is the real subject. "A most troublesome fellow my head" has a slightly old-fashioned word order, like someone introducing a badly behaved relative. The speaker holds his own head at arm's length and calls it a "fellow", as though it were a separate person with its own schemes. The mock-formal "a most" suggests affectionate exasperation rather than anger. Then comes "aching". We usually say a heart aches with longing, but here the ache has moved upward. Thinking itself has become a kind of wanting, and what the head wants is enormous: "to have the world". "Have" is slippery. It could mean to possess, to understand, to grasp, even to embrace. The poem never chooses.
The next line drops from the grand to the blunt. "And knot it up" is three monosyllables long, the shortest line in the poem, and it is itself tightly knotted. The phrase can be read two ways. To knot something is to secure it and make it manageable. A knot is also what a tangle looks like. The head hopes to tie the world into order, and the verb quietly admits that tying might just make a new mess.
The longest line, "seeing all the disorder of desire", is where the poem sprawls. Its Latinate words, "disorder" and "desire", chime with each other through their repeated *d* sounds, as if the line were tumbling over itself. The key word is "seeing". The head does not tidy anything. It changes how the mess looks, and desire's restlessness becomes "a wing for love". A wing lifts, so the very thing that seemed to threaten order becomes what allows love to fly. Because there is no punctuation, "seeing" can attach either to the head or to the whole act of knotting, and the poem is happy to leave that open. "Wing" has other meanings too. It might be an extension added to a building, a room built onto the house of the self. Judging by the imagery, there is also a faint link between the knot and the wing, since a knotted net is what catches a bird. That is only a possible echo, but it suggests the head may be trapping what it claims to free.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. Its rhythm is that of someone thinking aloud, and the line lengths do the shaping. The first line is long and rambling, the third is a tight little knot, the fourth spills over, and the fifth is short and ends on "love" with nothing to close it. That missing full stop means the wing is still beating when the poem stops. The lowercase letters also keep the voice modest. Even "love" gets no capital, which suits a speaker laughing at his own pretensions.
The poem is significant because it does exactly what it describes. The head wants to take the world's disorder and make something of it, and the poem takes a mess of feeling and makes a metaphor. That is where the title bites. Calling disorder a wing is a grand, flattering thing to say, and perhaps a little suspicious. Yet the poem doesn't mock the idea entirely. It refuses the two obvious options, cold control and helpless surrender, and offers a third: seeing differently. Whether that counts as wisdom or just a fine turn of phrase is left for the reader to decide. In five lines, the poem manages to be funny, self-aware and quietly hopeful, and it shows how much a small poem can hold when each word, even the humble "knot", does double work.