A birthday should be a day for toasts, yet the speaker of this four-line poem raises a glass and gets an unwelcome surprise. Looking into the wine, he sees his own reflection and does not like it. The central idea is that growing old carries us back to where we began. The old man is as "infirm as a child born yesterday," and the poem suggests that each birthday is a loss as well as a gain. The cheerful occasion becomes a small, wry confrontation with time.
The first line is built on a twist. "Infirm" is a word we usually attach to the elderly, but here it is paired with a newborn, so the two ends of life collapse into one image. The phrase "born yesterday" also plays on the idiom "I wasn't born yesterday," which means *you can't fool me, I have experience*. The poem turns it inside out. The speaker has all the years behind him, and he is as fragile as someone who arrived a day ago. The title, "Birthday boy," carries the same irony. It is the affectionate phrase we use for a small child at a party, and it is aimed here at someone who is plainly not small, which makes it teasing and slightly cruel at once.
The tone depends on the word "vexed." The speaker is not devastated or tragic. He is irritated, like someone who has been caught out. It is a slightly old-fashioned, fussy word, and it gives the poem a dry humour. His annoyance seems to be at being forced to look at himself, and "to see myself" makes the moment one of recognition rather than casual glancing.
The poem's most inventive move is the "glass of wine." A glass is also a mirror (we speak of a "looking glass"), and the wine's dark surface becomes a reflecting pool. Then comes the final line, "red and old," which hangs after the line break and refuses to say what it describes. It could be the wine, the face, or both. Red wine is red, but a flushed or ruddy face is red too, and judging by the imagery, newborns are also famously red-skinned, which would tie the last line back to the first. Within three words the drink, the old man and the baby blur together. There is a further irony here: old wine is prized and old people often are not, so the speaker is looking at something that improves with age and finds in it a reminder that he does not.
The poem is built as carefully as it is phrased. It has no punctuation and no capital letters except the pronoun "I," so the thought runs on in one unbroken breath, like something half-muttered over the glass. There is no end rhyme, but the sound patterns are tight. The long "i" of "child," "I" and "wine" runs through the poem like a thread. "Child" and "old" also share the closing "-ld" sound, so the first strong image and the last word answer each other across the whole poem. A life from beginning to end is squeezed into four lines.
The line lengths follow the same logic. Counted by syllable, they run nine, seven, five, three, a steady shrinking by two each time. The poem narrows as it goes, the way the speaker's sense of his own time might be narrowing. The last line, "red and old," is the shortest and has the bluntest rhythm, with three one-syllable words that land like a verdict. The poem has nowhere left to go after it.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It takes one of the most familiar ideas in literature, that age brings back childhood's helplessness, and refreshes it with a single domestic detail. It also avoids self-pity. By turning a birthday toast into a moment of rueful self-scrutiny, it reads as a small *memento mori*, a reminder of mortality, delivered with a raised eyebrow rather than a sigh. The poem lets us laugh at the speaker's vexation while we recognise that the same face is waiting in our own glass.