A sadomasochist is someone who finds pleasure in pain, so the title promises a complaint from exactly that person. What surprises is how little the five lines say about bodies or desire. The speaker sounds more like a gloomy economist or a traveller filing a report on a failed state, and the poem's pull comes from that mismatch between a private appetite and a public, political vocabulary.
The first stanza gives the diagnosis: "pleasure is a spent country / having laws but no art." Almost every word does double duty. "Spent" means exhausted, like money used up, and in a poem with this title it also hints at sexual release. "Country" turns pleasure into a territory with borders and officials, a place you can live in and be governed by. Its great lack is "art." Pleasure here has rules but no invention, procedure without imagination. The poem doesn't say what the laws are, but the title invites us to think of desire hemmed in by codes and agreements, or more broadly of pleasure that has been packaged, regulated and made dull.
Then comes the white space, and the second stanza opens on "like pain." The missing punctuation lets the phrase work two ways. It can finish the first thought, so that pain too is a country of laws without art. Or it can begin a new one, so that pain is where the real craft lives. The next line seems to choose the second option: pain is "what the poor have perfected." "Perfected" is a craftsman's word. It suggests long apprenticeship and a skill honed by necessity, so where pleasure has only laws, pain has art. The speaker sounds almost admiring, and the judging eye of a connoisseur is part of what the poem quietly exposes.
The last line is where the lament lands: the poor "now refuse out of hand." The idiom means to reject something at once, without hearing it out, and the literal "hand" brings in touch, handling, even the striking hand. We are left to infer who is being refused. The poem suggests it is the speaker, or the comfortable world he stands for, who wanted to draw on the poor's expertise in suffering and has been turned away. The joke is bleak. The one person who wants pain cannot get the genuine article, because those who know it best have stopped supplying it, or stopped putting up with it. Behind the comedy sits a sharp contrast: for the speaker pain is a taste, and for the poor it is a condition they have had to master. The poem never says this outright, and it never needs to.
The construction supports the tone. There is no capital letter, no comma, no full stop, so the lines come out in a flat, deadpan voice, like a verdict or a proverb. The stanzas are uneven, two lines and then three, as if the argument runs slightly past its first neat shape. The rhythm is loose and close to speech, with the clipped "pleasure is a spent country" giving way to the longer, rolling "which the poor have perfected / and now refuse out of hand," which ends on the blunt stop of "hand." There is no rhyme, and one could read that as fitting. Rhyme would be a small display of the very art the poem says pleasure lacks. The sounds do link the key terms, though. "Pleasure," "pain," "poor" and "perfected" all begin with the same plosive p, which ties pleasure and pain together while setting both against the poor, who own the craft.
What makes the poem worth studying is how much it packs into so little space. It borrows the form of a lament, which traditionally invites sympathy, and uses it to turn the lamenter's complaint into evidence against him. The vocabulary of country, law, poverty and refusal brings economics and politics into the most private territory there is. Whether we laugh at the speaker, pity him or feel uneasy about what he assumes the poor owe him is left to the reader. Like a good epigram, it ends just as the real thinking begins.