Bad news comes here without a single comma. In three short lines, a speaker reports that an illness has returned and responds by raising a drink to the doctor. The poem never says whether the gesture is grateful, bitter, or both, and that uncertainty is its central idea. A relapse leaves a person somewhere between gratitude and grievance, and the toast covers both.
The first line, "a misting morning," sets the scene, and it does more than that. Mist is neither rain nor clear air. It hangs and blurs, and it is hard to see through, much like a prognosis. The participle "misting" suggests something still going on, not a finished fact. Mornings usually stand for fresh starts, so placing a relapse inside one is quietly ironic. The day begins, and the old trouble begins with it.
The second line is the hinge. "My disease come back" drops the helping verb that grammar would normally supply ("has come back"), so the sentence sounds clipped, like a note scribbled in a chart or a thing said under the breath. The word "disease" is also worth hearing as *dis-ease*, the opposite of comfort. The possessive "my" turns it into something owned, an unwanted belonging. Then there is no punctuation, and "I drink" follows straight on, as if the speaker had no time to absorb the news before reaching for a glass. Because the line ends on "drink," the reader gets a moment to take it at face value: this person drinks, perhaps to numb the news, perhaps out of habit or defiance.
The last line reroutes that meaning. "To my physician" turns the bare act into a toast, and the toast can be read several ways. It could be sincere, thanks to the one person who is trying to help. It could be sarcastic, a salute to a doctor who promised a cure. It could be wry fellowship, two people equally beaten by the body. The second "my" matters here. The speaker owns the disease and the physician in the same breath, so illness and its remedy are both part of one private life. The vocabulary also shifts register. "Drink" is a blunt, one-syllable word, while "physician" is formal, Latinate, and a little old-fashioned, so the toast sounds half ceremony and half gallows joke.
In form, the poem counts out as five, seven, and five syllables, the familiar English-language haiku pattern, though what it observes is a human predicament more than a landscape. There is no rhyme, which suits the subject, since nothing resolves neatly. Instead, sound ties the lines together. The soft *s* sounds of "misting," "disease," and "physician" run from the first line to the last like a low hiss of breath. Against them, the hard *k* of "back" and "drink" lands like a small knock. The repeated *m* in "misting morning" and the double "my" give the poem a muttering, inward quality. The title, "Recurrence," is a clinical word, cooler than anything in the lines beneath it, and it also names what the poem enacts. The weather, the illness, and the habit of drinking can all come round again. The lack of a closing full stop leaves the poem open-ended, like an illness that has not finished with the speaker.
The poem is significant for how much it holds in so little space. It avoids self-pity and it avoids denial. It could have described symptoms or fear, and it gives only a weather report, a diagnosis in four words, and a gesture. Humor and sorrow sit in the same line, and neither cancels the other. Readers must decide for themselves how the toast tastes, whether sweet, sour, or both, and in doing so they have to imagine what it would be like to say it. The poem carries almost no information about the speaker, only a tone, and that tone feels familiar to anyone who has met bad news with a dry joke.