Before the speaker of "Pragmatist" does anything, he stops to ask whether a word still earns its keep. Is "evil" necessary, he wonders, "like work or going mad"? The title sets the tone. A pragmatist doesn't ask whether an idea is true, only whether it is useful, whether it is "a good fit for how / we think now." Evil is treated like a tool or a fashion, to be kept or dropped depending on the times. The questions have no question marks, and no line begins with a capital letter, so they sound half-muttered rather than put to anyone. The comparison is odd, too. Work is something we must do, madness something that happens to us, and evil is lined up beside them as one more fact of life that may or may not be optional.
Then the poem stops arguing and starts moving. "I walk into the night as full / as a lost moon" is the first image, and it is deliberately unsteady. A full moon is bright and round, but this one is "lost," drifting with no path. "Full" could mean sated, swollen, or brimming with something unsaid. The moon also quietly links back to "going mad," since the word "lunatic" comes from it, though that echo is my inference, not something the poem states. The next couplet is blunt: "I get close / to her that said no touching." The line break after "close" makes the reader feel the approach. The phrase "her that said" is rougher and more old-fashioned than "the woman who said," as if the speaker's voice has slipped into something more primitive. A boundary has been spoken aloud, and the speaker crosses it without comment or excuse.
What follows is a boast: "I am all mouth / I will eat and drink the land up." The tense shifts from present to future, from what he does to what he intends. "All mouth" works two ways. As an idiom it means someone who is all talk, which fits a speaker who has spent the opening lines talking about a word. Literally, it means pure appetite. He is both braggart and devourer. The scale also jumps, from one woman's refusal to an entire landscape, so that personal violation and large-scale consumption sit on the same line of hunger. The heavy, nearly all-monosyllabic stresses of "I am all mouth" hammer the point home.
The last couplet is the strangest: "my canary will be perfect / against the sun." A canary suggests the one carried into a mine as a warning of bad air. Here it is "my" canary, owned, and it is brought out into the daylight. Judging by the imagery, there are at least two ways to read it. The warning has been turned into an ornament, a yellow bird against a yellow sun, pretty and harmless. Or the bird is being sacrificed, and "perfect" is chilling because the speaker is content with a conscience that no longer raises the alarm. The poem also moves from night and moon to day and sun, which suggests the appetite will carry on in full light, unashamed.
Formally, the poem is six unrhymed couplets of free verse, with short lines and plain diction, and no end punctuation. The only punctuation mark is the pair of quotation marks around "evil," which hold the word up as something to be examined rather than used. Line breaks fall at telling places: "how" hangs at the end of its line, and "as full" leaves the moon waiting in the next one.
The poem is significant for what it does with its opening question. The word "evil" never appears again, yet everything after it is conduct that most readers would call by that name. The speaker has judged the word by its usefulness, and the poem lets him act without it. It never condemns him. The reader supplies that judgment, and in doing so quietly answers the question the poem began with.