A signature is the smallest act a bureaucrat performs, and "Functionary" starts there, with a pen in hand and a sentence that never gets its question mark. "what might I sign to once / without the least care or need". The phrasing is slippery. "Sign to" is not quite how we usually talk, and it suggests agreeing or subscribing to something rather than simply writing a name. "Once" can look back ("once, long ago") or forward along the line. Without punctuation, the speaker could be asking a question, confessing a habit, or musing on what he used to put his name to. The second line gives two absences, "care" and "need." The hand moved, but neither conscience nor necessity was involved.
The middle couplet turns toward comfort. "it was good to have an office" is the plainest line in the poem, a past-tense verdict that sounds settled and slightly defensive. Then comes the drop: "many people to moo." Moo is an animal noise forced into service as a verb, and the grammar leaves open who is doing the mooing and to whom. The speaker may moo at the crowd, the crowd may moo at him, or the whole building may be lowing together. In every reading, human talk has been flattened into a herd's sound, and the line is funny and faintly chilling at once.
The last couplet makes the animal comparison explicit. "and my way laid out / like ground for cattle to use." "Laid out" suggests a plan drawn up by someone else, a route the speaker follows rather than chooses. Cattle do not pick their pasture. They are walked along tracks that have already been worn or fenced. The word "use" does double work, since the ground is there for the cattle to use, but cattle are themselves things that get used. Its sound also answers "moo," whose long vowel it repeats, so the poem's two cattle words ring faintly against each other across the gap. There is an old link behind the choice, too: "cattle" and "chattel," meaning movable property, come from the same root. I'd read that as a pleasant echo rather than something the poem insists on.
The form behaves like the life it describes. Three tidy couplets sit like stalls or desks, each holding one small thought. The lines are short, running from about five to eight syllables, with no regular meter and no real rhyme. Everything is lowercase and nothing is punctuated, so no thought is ever definitely closed off. That fits a speaker who never decides, only proceeds. The absence of capitals and full stops also gives the voice a mumbling, half-private quality, as if we were overhearing someone reconsider his career while walking down a corridor.
What makes the poem worth rereading is its tone. It would have been easy to write a rant against office life, with the speaker as a victim. Instead he says "it was good," and the line sounds sincere. The institution gave him a room, a role, company and a direction, and he enjoyed not having to choose. The satire is aimed inward, and it works because the comfort is real. Only in the final simile does he step back far enough to see himself as livestock, and even then he doesn't protest.
The title does the same quiet work. A "functionary" is defined by what he does rather than who he is, and the poem shows how pleasant that definition can be and how little remains once it is accepted. In six short lines it asks a question that reaches beyond offices: what do we sign up to when we don't care and don't need to, and how much of our path do we hand over because someone else has already laid it out so neatly?