Nothing in these four short lines uses the word of the title. "Parsimonious" means stingy, sparing, unwilling to spend, and the poem never says it. Instead it lets one verb, "rations," carry the idea, so the title works like a key hung beside a locked door. The poem is about time, but time felt as something withheld rather than something that flows. At midnight, in an empty office, the new moment, the new day, the "new" itself arrives only in measured portions.
The scene is built from very little. A clock has "altered time," and the grammar leaves it unclear how. The clock might be wrong, or reset, or it might simply be a clock that has changed how the hour feels. The poem doesn't say, and that vagueness is useful. Time here is not a fact on a dial but something an object can quietly interfere with. Then comes "sitting in the dark office," where the participle has no clear owner. Is the clock sitting there? Is an unnamed person sitting beneath it? Both readings work, and together they put a watching presence in the room without describing one. The lowercase opening, the missing punctuation and the unnamed speaker all add to a sense of late-night drift, as if the thought began before the poem did.
An office is a telling place to set this. It is where time is usually spent, billed and scheduled, and the poem catches it after hours, dark and unproductive. In that emptied setting, midnight stops being a mere number and becomes an agent. It is the subject of the final sentence, and it "rations out the new." Rationing belongs to wartime, shortages and careful households, so the verb quietly turns the passage of time into scarcity. The phrase "the new" is also deliberately unfinished. We expect a noun to follow, such as the new day, the new year or the new hour. Because none arrives, "new" becomes a substance in its own right, something that can be measured out and handed over a counter.
The sound of the poem supports this. The first half is full of hard, clipped consonants: "clock," "dark," "sitting," "time." They tick. The long *i* of "time" returns in "midnight," which ties the two stanzas together without any rhyme at all. There is no rhyme scheme and no regular metre, and the poem's pulse comes from short lines read slowly. The syllable count is suggestive, though I would not call it a pattern. The first two lines run five and seven syllables, which faintly recalls the shape of a Japanese short form. The second stanza then shrinks to three and five. The poem begins to take a familiar measure and then cuts it short, which is rationing carried out in the form itself.
The line breaks do similar work. "where midnight" ends on a pause, and the reader waits a beat before learning what midnight does. That beat is a small experience of the withholding the poem describes. The break after "out" would have been the more obvious cut, but the poem keeps "rations out the new" together, so the last line arrives as one measured portion rather than a trickle.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it asks of the reader while appearing to ask for almost nothing. It gives a clock, a dark room and a single strange verb, and it leaves the reader to supply the feeling: the odd stillness of being awake when the day is changing, when every minute seems to be counted out rather than simply passing. Its stinginess is a method as well as a subject. Because the poem withholds so much, the one image it does spend, midnight as a careful keeper of the new, stays in the mind.