Read the title as the first word of the poem, and the opening changes. "Stuck / in amber I see / my whole study" is a single phrase that flows over the gap between title and text. The speaker may be the one who is stuck, or what he sees may be stuck, and the poem never decides. That ambiguity is where it starts.
The picture is simple enough. Amber is fossilised resin, and the usual reason to think of it is the small creature trapped inside it. The poem later names an ant, so it is reasonable to infer that this is the creature in the speaker's mind. Seen "in amber," the speaker's "whole study / of one binding business" is frozen too, a lifetime of effort held in a single glowing lump. The central idea is that the person who studies and the thing studied are caught in the same substance. The scholar looks at the ant and finds his own predicament.
"Study" and "business" carry most of the weight. A study is a piece of research, but it is also a room where someone sits and works. "Business" is a dry, slightly comic word for a life's labour, and it sits very close to "busy," which is what ants are famous for. "Binding" is the cleverest word of all. Resin binds what touches it, and a book is bound between covers, so the word hints at scholarship as well. "Binding" can also mean obligatory, a duty one cannot walk away from. Sticky trap, bookish labour and compulsion are all packed into one participle. The soft *b* sounds of "binding business" make the phrase almost tacky in the mouth, as if the language itself were gluey.
The second stanza turns from space to time. "Before the evening / comes to try" gives the poem a deadline, and evening, with its associations of ending, hints at the close of a day or of a life. It also fits the amber, since the colour of late light is amber. The verb "try" is the second great pun. Evening may attempt something, or it may put someone on trial, as in a court. If it is a trial, the question is what is being judged: the working life, the busyness, the habit of absorbed study. The poem raises the charge and does not give a verdict.
The last line, "man and ant," says everything in three one-syllable words. The two creatures are placed side by side with no hierarchy, joined by the plainest of conjunctions. The sounds join them as well: "man," "and" and "ant" share the same short vowel and the same nasal drag, so the line almost seems to be one word said three times. Placing man first and ant last also works against our expectations. We might think the human observes and the insect is observed, but at the end they are simply paired, both subject to the same evening.
The form supports this reading. There is no punctuation and no capital letters, and the whole poem is one long sentence that keeps running past its line breaks. Nothing stops the reader, which feels odd in a poem about being stuck. There is no rhyme to close the stanzas neatly. The lines are short, about four to six syllables in the first stanza and then thinning to three, three. The shrinking is a kind of tightening, as though the resin were setting. The poem begins with a longer breath ("of one binding business") and ends in a clipped, almost breathless pair of nouns.
The poem's significance lies in how much it gets from so little. It is slight on the page, yet it holds a pun-filled meditation on work, mortality and the comic resemblance between a researcher and an insect. It also refuses to be solemn. "Business" keeps it wry, and the small, odd image of a human and an ant on trial together keeps it humble. For a student, it is a good example of how a title can double as a first line, how a single word can mean three things at once, and how a poem can end by simply setting two things next to each other and letting the reader feel the weight.