Six short lines, and the title has already made its pun. A "farmhand" is a worker, but here the hand is also a literal hand, and it hurts. The laborer has shrunk to the part of him that does the labor, and that part is in pain "from struggling with doors in the dirt." The phrase is odd and physical. Doors normally stand upright in walls, but these lie in the ground. The poem doesn't say, but the picture suggests heavy cellar or storm doors set into the earth, stubborn and hard to lift. The line sounds as awkward as the task: the hard d's of "doors," "dirt" and "in the" jam against each other like a bad grip on a handle.
The second couplet moves from cause to aftermath. "how I hold it now" shifts into the present, and the speaker calls his hand "it," as if it had become something slightly separate from him. Then comes the simile that carries the whole poem: "like a leased field." To lease a field is to work it, tend it and answer for it without owning it. Set beside the title, the comparison is sharp. A farmhand by definition works land that belongs to someone else, and the speaker treats his own hand the same way, as a borrowed thing handled with care and some worry. The body is something he rents out by the day, and the damage is a cost he alone carries. There is a physical truth in it too. People cradle an injured hand away from the body, carefully, the way you would carry something you were responsible for but did not own.
The last couplet turns away from the speaker. The simile opens into a scene, and the grammar helps. "Where" attaches to "field," so the comparison quietly stops being a comparison and becomes a place: "where oranges fall in the evening / and few venture upon them." The "I" has vanished by now, and the hand has become a landscape. The oranges are an unexpected gift. Their color suggests dusk or warmth, and the idea of ripe fruit dropping unpicked is both abundant and wasteful. One could also hear a faint echo of the throbbing hand in that heavy, ripe roundness, though the poem leaves the link unspoken. "Venture upon" is a slightly formal phrase that suggests stumbling across something rather than seeking it out. The field is remote, its fruit goes unnoticed, and "few" instead of "none" leaves room for a visitor. That could be a sympathetic stranger, or the reader.
The construction is spare. There are three couplets, no rhyme and no punctuation at all. The lines begin in lowercase and run on like unedited thought, so the poem never reaches a full stop and trails off into its own last image. The rhythm is loose, two to four beats a line, and the final line ends on the soft, unstressed "upon them," a falling cadence that matches the oranges dropping. The sound shifts too. The first stanza is dense with d's and the second breathes through the h's of "hand," "hold," "how." The third settles into the gentler f and v sounds of "fall," "field," "few" and "venture." The language moves from struggle to quiet in the way an evening comes on after a day of work.
The poem's quality lies in what it holds back. It never complains and never explains why the hand hurts beyond a single odd, vivid cause. It trusts one comparison to carry the whole condition of the hired worker: the body as a tenancy, effort that benefits others, and a private beauty that happens out of sight. Pain usually makes us look inward, but here it makes the speaker see outward, into an evening field where something ripe falls to the ground and almost no one comes to find it. A reader finishes with the sense of having been shown, very briefly, a place most people never visit.