Nothing much happens in "Housekeeper," and that is the point. A woman has fish on the table. She has little time and takes little notice of her little green yard. Then the poem swings its camera up and out. Night arrives, money starts asking awkward questions, and "everywhere the people" are pushed into a market where even their troubles must be sold. The central idea is that the smallness of one person's day is not private at all. Her shortage of time and attention belongs to the same world as the pressure on everyone else.
The word "little" does the first job of persuasion. It appears four times in the first two couplets ("little time," "little purpose," "little notice," "little green yard"), and each time it shrinks something different: her hours, her aims, her awareness, even her patch of grass. At first the repetition sounds like description, but by the fourth "little" it sounds like a verdict. "Little time to little purpose" is neatly double-edged. It echoes the idiom "to little purpose," meaning to small effect, but it also suggests that her purposes themselves have been made small. The green yard is the only colour in the poem and the only living thing besides her, and she hardly looks at it.
The title adds another layer. "Housekeeper" is plain and domestic, and the poem never says whose house this is or whether she is paid. Still, "economy" comes from a Greek word for managing a household, and the poem seems to travel that route, from the table to money to a whole population of buyers and sellers. The fish itself is given no detail, no sauce, no guests. Judging by the imagery, it reads as necessity rather than pleasure.
The hinge is the simile in the third couplet: "the night like any money / will call things into question." Night and money seem an odd pair, but both arrive whether we like it or not, and both end the day's pretending. "Call" has a financial ring, as in calling in a loan or calling a bluff, while "into question" is the language of doubt. Both night and money, then, ask what anything is worth. The phrase "any money" also sounds like the anxious "if there's any money" of a tight household budget, so the grand abstraction slips back into the kitchen.
The final couplet widens the view, and its grammar matters. "Being forced" is passive, so nobody is named as doing the forcing, and the pressure feels as impersonal as weather. Then comes "sell their ills." We might expect people to sell their wares, or, in a familiar phrase, their souls. Instead they sell their ills. One reading is that misfortune and suffering have become merchandise, so that people must turn their afflictions into something marketable. The phrase also has a bitter tidiness of sound, with "sell" and "ills" echoing each other's double l.
Formally, the poem is four unrhymed couplets with no punctuation and no capital letters. The lines are short, with only a couple of stresses each, and they sound like speech rather than song. Without full stops, the sentences slide through the line breaks, and the last two couplets both begin with "and," so the poem piles up like a list of worries that keeps getting longer. The lack of rhyme keeps the tone flat and deadpan. The lowercase flattens everything too, so that fish, yard, night, money and people sit on one level, none more important than another. That levelling is part of the unease, because it suggests that when everything can be priced, nothing stands apart.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does without raising its voice. There is no speech about poverty or markets, only a woman, a table and a yard. The reader makes the connection between the cramped domestic scene and the wide economic one. It also shows how repeated ordinary words and a single passive verb can carry an argument. Whether we imagine "she" as a worker or a homemaker, the poem quietly suggests that when everything has a price, the first thing to run out is attention to the little green yard.