Nineteen words, and a whole philosophy of gardening that begins with doing nothing. "I let my garden grow": the verb is *let*, not *make* or *tend*. The speaker's part is permission rather than labour, and the line leans back in its chair. Then comes "and sing to the dirt," and the poem swerves. The gardener serenades neither flowers nor vegetables but the ground beneath them, the unglamorous stuff everyone else walks on.
The song itself is where the poem gets interesting. After the colon and the white space, the lines drop their capitals and their punctuation: "my love my drudging wench / be drunk as me." There is no comma between "my love" and "my drudging wench," so the words tumble out the way a drunk person talks, without stopping to organise anything. We can't tell whether these are two names or one, and that suits the mix of tenderness and condescension in the address. The voice is affectionate and a little patronising in the same breath.
"Wench" is the most striking word. It is archaic and tavern-ish, and it gives the speaker a rowdy, old-fashioned voice, perhaps the voice of a drinking song, though that is my inference from the register. It also sits oddly beside "drudging," a participle that suggests work with no end in sight. Who is doing the drudging? Not the speaker, who has only "let" things happen. The dirt is the real worker, rotting leaves, holding roots and feeding everything above it. Without announcing it, the poem reverses the usual picture of a garden: the human is a loafer with a song, and the soil is the true gardener. Calling that labour "love" reads as gratitude dressed up as a joke. There is also a fair question about whether the poem laughs at its speaker, who seems not to notice how much he depends on the one he addresses. A reader may also feel the pinch of casting the earth as a female servant-lover, an old habit in how people talk about nature.
The sound of the poem backs this up. Heavy, thudding consonants gather around the key words: "garden," "dirt," "drudging," "drunk." The short *u* in "love," "drudging" and "drunk" quietly links affection, toil and intoxication, so that the three ideas almost become one. There is no end rhyme, but the ear keeps finding echoes. The rhythm is a loose pattern of three beats, then two, then three, then two: *I LET my GARden GROW / and SING to the DIRT / my LOVE my DRUDGing WENCH / be DRUNK as ME.* The long-short alternation gives the poem a swaying gait, like a ballad stanza that has been drinking. Each short line lands on a stressed final word, "dirt" and then "me," with a small thud, like a hiccup or a stumble.
That last word matters. The poem ends on "me," and the grammar is slurred. "Drunk as me" drops the "I am" that a sober sentence would keep. The speaker's final act is to line himself up with the ground, to ask the earth to be what he is. What drunkenness means for dirt is left open, but the imagery suggests soil soaked and loosened, heavy with rain, even fermenting as compost does. The speaker is not scolding or commanding. He wants company, in the way a drinker wants everyone else to have a glass.
Here the title's adjective starts to work. "Drunken" suggests staggering, and the garden is one that has been allowed to stagger too, growing without strict order. The central idea is that real fertility is a kind of abandon. The poem treats good gardening as surrender rather than control, a matter of trusting what the ground already knows how to do. The first line's "let" and the last line's "be drunk" are the same gesture, loosening your grip.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it tips over in so little space. Work and idleness swap places, master and servant blur, and the dirt becomes a lover, a labourer and a drinking partner. By the end a student might reasonably ask the question the poem never states: who, exactly, is the gardener here?