Six short lines, no capital letters, no punctuation, and yet a whole sick day unfolds: the long hours at home, the failure of reading, the sudden lurch toward food. The poem is tiny, but it is hungry.
The title does the first piece of work. "Feed a fever" sounds like a twisted echo of the familiar folk advice "feed a cold, starve a fever." The speaker seems to be taking the opposite course, trusting appetite over proverb. The opening couplet sets the mood in a flat, note-like voice: "sick all day at home / my books depress." There is no "I am" and no fuss, just a fragment, as if scribbled on the back of a hand. The verb "depress" does double duty. The books make the speaker gloomy, but the word also holds its physical sense of pressing down, as though the shelves themselves were leaning on him. Books are supposed to be the comfort of a sick day, so the line break lets the disappointment land hard.
The next couplet answers with a logical little "so": "so I make room for more / leg of pork." "Make room for more" is what people say at a dinner table, but it is also what a book-lover says to a crowded shelf. The phrase hovers between the two appetites, and the poem quietly suggests they are the same one. The sounds help. "More" and "pork" almost rhyme, sharing the same heavy vowel, and the second line is the shortest in the poem at three syllables. "Leg of pork" drops like a dense, greasy weight, and the page seems to groan under it.
The syllable counts run roughly 5, 4, 6, 3, 5, 6. In the first two couplets a longer line is followed by a shorter one, a stumbling, slightly breathless pattern that suits someone lying around feeling ill. In the last couplet the lines swell instead, as if the appetite is growing.
That final couplet is where the poem turns strange: "and a roasted head / setting my paper supper." The little word "and" piles on another dish, and the menu becomes grotesque. A roasted head might be a pig's head on a platter, but with that title in mind it is hard not to think of the speaker's own head, roasting with fever. I would not call that the only reading, but the poem leaves the door open. If so, the speaker is both the feaster and the feast.
"Setting" is equally slippery. It can mean laying a table, but it also suggests the sun going down on a day that has lasted too long. Printers also set type, and that fits the strangest phrase in the poem, "paper supper." Books are paper, so perhaps the speaker is metaphorically eating them, or perhaps the meal exists only on paper, as words. The phrase itself is a pleasure to say. "Paper" and "supper" share their ending, and the repeated p sounds make the pair chime like a nursery rhyme, which adds a note of dark comedy. The poem ends with no full stop, and the table is set but we never see anyone eat.
That open ending points to the poem's central irony. The speaker turns away from books because they depress him and reaches for something physical and fleshy, a body's remedy for a body's illness. Yet the supper he finally sits down to is made of paper, and the poem we are reading is made of paper too. Reading has not been escaped at all. It has been swallowed and turned into the meal. Fever, in this version, feeds on the imagination as much as on the stomach.
The poem is worth studying because it does so much with so little. Its humor is sly and slightly gross, its mood is believable, and its double meanings ("depress," "make room," "setting," "paper") each open two doors at once. For students, it is a useful reminder that a short poem is not a simple one. When every word has to carry extra weight, the line breaks, the near-rhymes and the missing punctuation all become part of the meaning.