Expectation, the poem's first line tells us, is not a feeling but a raw material. "Expectation is an ore / given to us all." Ore is rock that only might contain something valuable, and it has to be dug out, crushed and refined before it is worth anything. Calling expectation an ore makes it sound like unfinished stuff that we all receive without choosing. "Given" matters here too, since nobody earns it. It is handed out like a ration, and what we do with it is another matter.
The second couplet picks up the industrial thread, and the title helps. A template is a pattern from which copies are cut, so "the round mouth / engineers the plate" reads like a stage in a manufacturing process, with raw material pressed into a standard shape. Whose mouth it is stays open. It could be the mouth of a mine, a die, a speaker's rounded "O", or the mouth that eats from the plate. The poem never says, and with no punctuation to fix the grammar, the reader has to choose. My reading is that wanting and speaking shape what we are served, and that we then mistake the shape for nature.
The third couplet is the poem's argument and also its longest line, ten syllables against the three or four around it. "Seeing a safe we believe in money." What we actually see is a safe, a steel box, and never the money. Faith in value rests on a container we cannot look inside. The next line, "a thing as false as all fur," is stranger. Fur is a surface that looks like nature but is borrowed, an animal's coat worn by someone else, so perhaps belief in money is as secondhand as a pelt on a shoulder. Sound does some of the work before sense does. "Safe," "false" and "fur" all begin or end on that same breathy f, so the ear links security, falseness and fur before the mind has decided what the comparison means.
After this the poem turns to fairy tale. "A secret king can walk / round difficult crags." A king who is secret has power that does not announce itself, the opposite of a vault. "Crags" takes us back to the rocky home of ore, and "round" echoes the "round mouth" earlier. The king goes round the difficulty and does not climb it or fight it. The poem does not say who he is. Judging by the sequence, he could stand for an imagination or self that has slipped free of the template, though it is just as plausible that he is one more comforting story.
The last couplet is the only place the poem says "I," and its tone is plain and a little tired. "I read myself to sleep / to get out of my head." The head is where expectations are stored and replayed, and sleep is the one place they cannot follow. There is a quiet joke in "read myself," as if the speaker were the book. The escape also has an irony, because reading means entering someone else's sentences, another kind of template. A reader finishing the poem may notice they are doing the same thing.
The form supports all this. There are five unrhymed couplets, with no capitals and no punctuation. Each couplet is a sealed unit, and the poem leaps between them without explaining the connection. The lines are short and flat, which gives the abstract statements the weight of proverbs, and the one longer line stands out as the point of the argument. The imagery moves from ore to plate to safe to fur to crag, a chain of hard, metallic or rocky things that sets off the soft, ordinary human voice of the ending.
The poem is significant for how much it packs into about thirty words. It makes an argument about belief, value and the habits of thought that shape us, and it does so through images where an essay would use explanation. It also does not claim to be free of what it describes. By ending on a speaker who is tired of his own mind, it admits that seeing through the template does not mean leaving it behind. What the reader is left with is a way of looking at everyday things like a safe, a coat or a bedtime book, and wondering how much of their value we were simply told to expect.