The speaker opens with a strange, compact image: pleasure as a "spent country," a place that still has rules but has lost its creativity. Laws without art suggests pleasure that has hardened into routine, a set of procedures with no real invention left in it. The title frames this as a lament, so the tone is weary and a little wry, the voice of someone who knows the rituals by heart and finds them emptied out.
The second stanza turns to pain, which gets compared to pleasure. Here the poem makes its sharpest move. Pain is something "the poor have perfected," as if suffering were a craft they've mastered through necessity. Yet they "refuse out of hand" what the speaker still seeks. That sting is the heart of it: the speaker's desire looks almost indulgent beside people who have no choice about hurting. The mood is dry, self-aware, and quietly uncomfortable, with the humor turning into something closer to embarrassment.