Six short lines, and a whole young life is sketched in them. The title borrows a familiar formula, the portrait of the artist as a young man, and swaps "artist" for the plainer "writer". The grand frame is set up only to be punctured. What hangs inside it is no heroic likeness but a sly, amused, slightly embarrassed self-portrait.
The first couplet gives us the body before the mind. "A long bag of folly" is a wonderfully graceless image: a sack, lanky and shapeless, stuffed with foolishness. It also faintly recalls the idiom of the windbag, though the poem never says so. Then comes the odd turn, "who looks / better than he thinks." The line break after "looks" lets the verb hang for a moment, and the lack of punctuation leaves the phrase double-edged. He may look better than he believes he does, or his appearance may outrun his thinking, a handsome surface over a muddled head. The poem declines to choose. Notice too that the young man is "he" here. The speaker studies his earlier self from outside, the way you might glance at a stranger in an old photograph.
In the second couplet that distance closes into "I", but only after a backward step in time and in grammar. "A little king of drink / was I" turns the sentence around in an old-fashioned, almost ballad-like way, and the "I" is stranded alone at the end of the shortest line in the poem. The crown is comically small. "Little" shrinks the title, and the kingdom is only a bottle or a barroom. Yet there is some swagger left in the phrase, because the young man did feel like a king, and the older voice does not entirely deny him that. The sounds draw the lines together. "Little," "king" and "drink" all lean on the same short vowel, and "drink" also rhymes, almost, with "thinks" from the stanza before. Both words contain the word "ink," planted quietly in the very lines that describe the fool's failings.
That pays off in the final couplet. "For the fool may be / a cunning scribe" works as an argument, and the little word "for" makes it one. Everything before it becomes evidence in a defence. The poem moves from bag to king to fool, a small cast drawn from a royal court, and the fool is the one figure in a court who is licensed to say true things in a silly voice. The verb is cautious, too. The fool "may be" a scribe, not "is", so the claim is hedged and a little wry. "Cunning" cuts two ways, meaning both skilled and sly. "Scribe" is a modest word for a writer, suggesting a copier or clerk rather than an inspired poet. The long "i" of "I" comes back in "scribe," so the poem ends on the same sound the speaker used to name himself. The drinker and the writer turn out to be one person.
The form supports this lightness. The poem is three couplets, all in lowercase, with no punctuation at all, so it sounds offhand, like something muttered rather than declared. The lines also shrink: the first runs to eight syllables, and by the end of the second stanza one has only two. The opening line feels stuffed like the bag it describes. The later ones are pared down, as if the poem were sobering up as it goes. There is no regular meter and no strict rhyme scheme, only echoes, which suits a speaker who has stopped performing.
What gives this tiny poem its weight is its honesty about origins. It does not pretend that writing grows out of dignity, discipline or noble suffering. It suggests instead that a writer may be assembled from foolishness, vanity and drink, and that the observing, shaping part of the mind can quietly be at work all the while. Since the poem itself is a neat, self-aware piece of writing, it seems to prove its own last line. The fool, looking back, has become the cunning scribe, and the portrait is the evidence.