A meal of skin and "monstrous fat" opens the poem, but by the last line the menu has changed completely: what is wanted now is "more sleep". The title promises a poem about prison food, yet the food is only the first item in a longer list of deprivations. One reasonable reading is that confinement shrinks a person's world to the body's most basic wants, while the world outside pronounces judgment on them. The poem never says which prison or which era, so everything depends on what the words themselves suggest.
The grammar is the first thing to notice. There is no punctuation and no capital letter anywhere, so sentences slide into one another. "prisoners forced to eat skin / and monstrous fat" hangs in the air across the stanza break, and only then does the verb arrive: the prisoners "kiss the flung stone." The delay matters. The prisoners begin as passive, "forced" to eat, and end by performing an act, though a strange one. Kissing a stone can read as reverence, submission or humiliation, and the poem will not choose. The stone is "flung," which implies anger, but nobody is shown throwing it. That anonymity makes the violence feel general, as if it comes from everywhere at once.
"Stone" and "sin" also sit close together, and the phrase "a fancy woman" (an old-fashioned term for a mistress or prostitute) adds to the effect. Judging by these words, the poem seems to echo the familiar scene of a woman threatened with stoning for her sins. That is an inference, since the poem never names the story. But it would explain why the prisoners' punishment is bound up with other people's moral certainty as well as with what they are fed.
The sound of the poem is rough and heavy. Most of the key words are blunt monosyllables: skin, fat, kiss, stone, raw, sin. The one long, inflated word is "monstrous," which makes the fat grotesque and might also hint at how prisoners are seen from outside. There is no end rhyme, but there are quieter echoes. "Skin" in the first line returns as "sin" in the fourth, one letter apart, so the body and the moral verdict seem to rhyme at a distance. The hard *f* sounds of "forced," "fat," "flung" and "fancy" run through the poem like a repeated knock.
Rhythm does some of the work too. The lines are uneven, but they tend to shorten toward the end. "raw as their opinions of sin" is the longest line, and the last stanza narrows to "of a fancy woman" and then "of more sleep," the briefest line of all. The poem seems to run out of breath, and with no full stop it trails off rather than concludes.
"Raw" is the most interesting word. It belongs to the food, since uncooked skin and fat are about as unappetising as a meal can get, and it also describes "their opinions of sin," which are unrefined and painful. The simile joins a physical thing to an abstract one. It is also unclear whose opinions these are: the prisoners', the stone-throwers', or both. Because the pronoun is ambiguous, judgment seems to pass back and forth between those inside and those outside.
The closing run of "of" phrases, in which opinions of sin become opinions of a fancy woman and then opinions of more sleep, gives the poem its odd sadness. Grammatically, a moral idea, a desire and a bodily need all sit on the same level. Sin, sex and rest are listed like items on a tray. Read another way, they are the things the prisoners are denied, with sleep, the plainest of them, left at the bottom of the list.
The poem is worth studying because it gets so much from so little. In six short lines it moves from the gross physical detail of a prison meal to ideas of punishment, guilt and longing, and it leaves the reader to decide who is being judged and by whom. It gives no moral of its own. Its final image is a person wanting to sleep a little longer, and that modest wish is what is left once everything else has been taken away.