Five couplets, no capital letters, not a single comma, and still the poem sounds like a muttered curse. Its title promises an "invective against vituperation": a scolding of scolding, a shout against shouting. The joke is built in, and so is the trap. How do you attack loudness without becoming loud?
The first couplet names the target: "people demanding we begin to fear / sing their own charge." These are people who insist on alarm, and "charge" does a lot of work. It can mean an accusation, a price, a responsibility and, given what follows, a cavalry charge. "Sing" is a sly choice too. It suggests performance, even self-serenading, as if the alarmists enjoyed the sound of their own warnings. With no punctuation, we can't tell where the demand ends and the song begins, so outrage blurs into one continuous stream.
The second couplet holds the poem's best surprise: "invading us like an army of clerks / weary of life." Armies in poems are usually glorious or terrifying, but clerks push paper. The menace here is bureaucratic, repetitive and drab, a grinding of forms and complaints. "Weary of life" deflates the picture further. These invaders take no joy in conquest. The phrase can cling to the clerks, but it can also drift back to "us," so that the invaded are the weary ones.
The line lengths carry the same deflation. The first three couplets share a shape: a long line of eight or nine syllables followed by a stub of four. "Sing their own charge," "weary of life" and "into a salvo" each drop like a gavel. The last couplet evens out into lines of five and six syllables, and the poem seems to exhale. There is no rhyme, but the third couplet builds its own echo: "ado," "echo" and "salvo" all end on an open "o," so the sound bounces around inside the couplet.
That couplet, "with much ado making an echo / into a salvo," turns on its content as well. "Much ado" recalls the fuss of Shakespeare's *Much Ado About Nothing*, a great deal of noise over very little. An echo is, by definition, secondhand sound, repetition with nothing original in it. The poem imagines that repetition hardening into ammunition. Nobody has to say anything new; saying it again, louder, turns it into a volley. The vocabulary of "charge," "army," "invading" and "salvo" shows how readily argument is described as war, and the poem uses that language even as it distrusts it.
Then comes the turn: "may they die in it / and the quiet come home safe." "May they" has the cadence of a prayer, yet it is plainly a curse, which makes the poem guilty of the vituperation in its title. The curse is oddly gentle, though. Nobody is killed *by* us. The shouters die "in it," swallowed by their own salvo. And the last line recasts the war metaphor. If noise is the army, then quiet is the soldier, or the child out too late, whom we want back from the front. The poem ends in plain, mostly one-syllable words, and the tenderness feels earned because everything before it was so clipped.
The poem's significance lies in this self-awareness. It names no villain, event or country, so it fits any moment when public talk turns shrill. Judging by the imagery, its subject is the rhetoric of fear, in which every disagreement is an invasion. It also makes its argument through form. At about a dozen lines of spare, lowercase text, it is itself a small quiet thing, and it doesn't pretend that wanting quiet is a pure or innocent wish. By letting a curse slip into its own prayer, it admits that anger is contagious and that even the person who hates noise can be tempted to throw a last stone. Whether we forgive that last stone, or find it funny, is part of what the poem leaves for us to decide.