"Sartoriology" looks like a word invented for the occasion. It glues the "-ology" of serious academic subjects onto "sartorial", the word for clothes and tailoring, so the title promises a solemn study of dress. The poem itself is fourteen or so plain words long, and it spends them on something much older than fashion: the way a person changes on the outside while staying the same underneath, and the way every road, however smartly dressed, leads back to water.
The poem is built on contrast. "My new suit" belongs to the world of appearances: job interviews, weddings, funerals, the clothes we put on to be taken seriously. Set against it are "my old lace hands". The phrase is odd and lovely. Lace is delicate, patterned and full of holes, so it suggests skin gone thin and papery with age, or hands so veined and worn that they seem woven rather than made. Lace is also something old that people keep and treasure. The speaker has dressed up the surface, but the hands give the game away. No tailor can alter them.
Then there is the movement. "Turn and return" is the poem's hinge, and it does what it says: "return" contains "turn", so the second word doubles back on the first. The pair is also a nicely chosen pun. Turning is a tailor's word, since a worn coat can be turned inside out to give old cloth a second life. It is also what a line of verse does, and the word "verse" itself comes from the Latin for turning. The poem seems to know it is a thing that turns and returns. Because there is no punctuation, we cannot tell whether the phrase is an order the speaker gives himself, a description of what he does, or a general law. All three readings fit.
The second couplet gives the destination: "to the river sure as night". The rhythm changes here. The first couplet runs four syllables and four. The second runs five, then seven, and the last line stretches out like a current gathering length. The final simile is deliberately unfinished. We expect "sure as night follows day", but the poem stops at "night", and the darkness is left hanging. "Sure" is the key word. It can describe the river, which is always there, or the hands, which move with a confidence that is more than a little fatalistic. Either way, the sense of inevitability is strong. A river suggests time passing, washing, baptism and the end of things all at once, and the poem never says which, so the reader can choose.
The sound of the poem supports this quiet fatalism. Nearly every word is a short, plain one: "new", "suit", "old", "hands", "night". The only longer words are "river" and "return". Against this, the title is the most ornate thing in the poem, a Latinate mouthful that the body of the poem seems to quietly outgrow. The joke is gentle. We begin with a pretend science of clothing and end among the oldest things there are: hands, water, night. There is no end rhyme, and the short, unpunctuated lines have an almost breathless drift, but a few sounds quietly link them. "Suit" and "sure" share their opening hiss, and "night" closes on the same hard *t* that ends "suit", as if the last line had been tailored to match the first.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it asks of so little. It would be easy to write a long, sentimental poem about ageing and mortality. Here, one new garment, one pair of worn hands and one river do the work, and the reader supplies the rest. The poem is also a small lesson in how syntax can make meaning. Because it has no subject-verb sentence to pin it down, it has the feel of a thought half-overheard, and that is part of its charm. We never learn where the speaker is going in his good suit, and the poem suggests this does not matter. He turns, he returns, and the river is waiting.