Six short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and a title that does most of the explaining. "House arrest" tells us the situation: someone confined to their own home. The poem never says whether this is a legal sentence or a figure of speech for being stuck indoors, and that openness helps it. What it does make clear is the central idea. Home, usually the place we run to, has become a worn-out weapon, and being shut inside it is less a drama than a long dull ache.
The first couplet reads like an inventory of what the days contain: "a little new history / and a little hell." There is no verb, only things piled up. "New history" is a quietly odd phrase, since history is supposed to be what has already happened. Judging by the phrase, the speaker may mean the small events that accumulate in a confined life, or news arriving from outside. Either way, history shrinks to something you could be handed a little of. The same goes for hell. The word promises torment on a grand scale, but "a little hell" is homely and measured out, almost like a serving size. The poem suggests that confinement is hell in miniature, which is perhaps more wearing than the real thing.
Then comes the simile that holds the poem together: "home here / is like an old gun." The line break matters. "Home here" hangs alone for a moment, a place pinned down, before "is" arrives. Notice too how the sounds link the ideas: history, hell, home, here. The breathy *h* runs through the poem like a sigh, so that history, hell and home start to feel like one thing said in different ways.
The gun is a loaded image, but the poem quickly empties it. This one is "old," and it is "full of bark and use." Bark has several meanings that all fit. A gun's report can be called a bark, and the phrase "all bark" suggests noise without bite. Bark is also the skin of a tree, so a wooden house, or a wooden gunstock, might be implied. That second meaning is an inference, but it fits the roughness and age the line is after. "Use" completes the picture: this is something handled and worn smooth, a thing whose purpose has been spent. Where we expect a gun to be full of ammunition, this one is full of noise and wear.
The last line, "and little action," is the neatest turn. In a gun, the action is the mechanism that loads and fires it, so an old gun with little action barely works. In everyday speech, action means events, things happening. One word covers both: the gun can hardly fire, and the life inside the house can hardly move. The poem ends on a deflation rather than a bang, which is exactly the point. "Little" has now appeared three times ("a little new history," "a little hell," "little action"), and the repetition wears the grandeur off every big word nearby.
The structure carries the same feeling. Three unrhymed couplets, and most lines settle around five syllables, short and clipped, with the three-syllable "and home here" the shortest. Three lines begin with "and," which adds without ever building toward anything. Most striking, the only verb in the entire poem is "is." Everything else is a noun phrase: history, hell, bark, use, action. A poem about a life with little action contains almost no action in its grammar, only being.
What makes it worth reading is how much it does with how little. Nothing in the text tells us who is speaking or why they are confined, and that reticence keeps the poem from sliding into self-pity or politics. Instead it gives us a single, strange comparison and lets it echo. A gun suggests danger, and the poem takes the danger away, leaving a household object that is old, loud, and mostly out of order. The effect is both funny and bleak, which is a hard thing to manage in six lines.