"Outlook" is a short, bleak poem built from a few sharp images that don't quite explain themselves. It opens with a saying that sounds like folk wisdom, "work shall make work," but it reads less like encouragement than a trap: effort only produces more effort. The dog chasing a deer adds to that sense of pursuit with no rest, and maybe no end.
Then the view widens. The Earth, "blue as ice," ages through "eight governments," so whole political eras pass like moments. The planet looks beautiful but cold, and human rule looks small and temporary against it.
The last image is the darkest: a hangman dreaming on his death-bed. The poem doesn't say what he dreams, which leaves us uneasy. We might imagine guilt, or a life spent carrying out other people's orders. The speaker stays detached and doesn't comment, and that restraint makes the mood chilly, fatalistic, and quietly unsettling.