A sentence that never finishes: that is how "Propriety" begins. "who was not for the war" hangs from no one. There is no name before the "who" and no verb to tell us what this person did. The next couplet adds only "and the business of war," so the sentence stays a list of things he was not for. The poem opens on an absence, and the reader has to decide who is missing.
The second couplet shifts the ground. "and whatever he pretends / means no hurt in it" is hard to parse on first reading. It might mean that whatever he claims to be doing is harmless. It might mean that the pretence itself, the act of putting on a face, is meant innocently. The poem doesn't choose. What it gives us is a tone, the small defensive shrug of "no hurt in it." The phrase is flat and sounds like an excuse, and the more it insists on harmlessness, the more it makes us wonder what harm is being denied.
Then comes the image that carries the most weight: "a failed swan / coming home to a field." A swan suggests grace, whiteness and water, so a swan that has failed, and has come down to grass instead of a lake, is a figure of deflated ambition. "Failed" and "field" share almost the same frame of sounds (f, l, d), so the two words seem to lean on each other, and the failure and the ordinary patch of ground it ends up on feel linked. The bird could stand for the "he" of the second couplet, or for the speaker. The poem lets the picture stay unattached, which makes it easier to apply to either.
Only in the final couplet does a speaker appear: "at the office I bound myself / to strict rules." The first person arrives late and says something dry and procedural. Two echoes make this ending work. "Business" in the first stanza now meets "office," so the language of war and the language of work start to overlap. And "bound" quietly answers "coming home": the word means tied up, but it also means heading somewhere, as in "homeward bound." The speaker ties himself down at the very moment the swan comes down. Because "bound" is something done to oneself, the rules are chosen, and no one forces them on him.
The title then reads as a quiet charge. Propriety is good behavior, the correct manner, and the word shares its Latin root with "property." It is the virtue of people who keep their desks tidy. Read this way, the poem suggests a gap between what a person believes ("not for the war") and how a person lives inside institutions. The poem never states it outright, but one possible reading is that strict rules are what let someone stay opposed to something in principle while taking part in its machinery. Nobody here is a villain, and that is the unsettling part.
The form supports this reading. The poem is four unrhymed couplets with no punctuation and no capital letters. The lines are short, mostly between four and seven syllables, with a light, uneven beat. "and the business of war" nearly skips along on its stresses, which gives it a brisk, almost bureaucratic ease. The one rhyme-like effect is the repeated "war" at the ends of the first two lines, an identical rhyme that sounds like a verbal tic. After that the sound loosens: field, rules, it. The lack of punctuation leaves the connections between ideas open. We cannot tell whether the swan is a comment on the man, a memory, or a daydream at the desk.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does by leaving things out. It names no war, no office and no person, and it offers no confession or verdict. A reader looking for a protest poem will not find one. The poem is about the quieter thing that comes after protest: a tidy, well-behaved life that may or may not be a form of complicity. It sets its small, plain words side by side and trusts the reader to feel the friction between them.