"Betterment" is a word from charity leaflets and self-help covers, which is what makes it such a sly title for eight lines about a bargain nobody should want to take. The speaker imagines packing away his "dark rain" and becoming, in exchange, "a poet / of insipid ruins." Whether that would let him "stop being hurt" is the question the poem ends on, and it never answers. The title promises improvement, and the poem keeps asking whether this would be one.
The grammar carries much of the unease. The poem is a single sentence with no punctuation at all, not even a question mark. It opens with "if," pivots on "and," and then flips into the inverted "would I live," so it reads half as a wish and half as a dare. With no full stop to rest on, the thought keeps tumbling down the page, like someone turning one idea over in the small hours. The short lines, between three and six syllables each, give the voice a hesitant, breath-catching quality. There is no rhyme to tidy things up.
The imagery sets a domestic object against a force of nature. A "box" is something you can close and put on a shelf, while rain is weather, which nobody owns or controls. Wanting to put it "back / in the box" is therefore both childlike and doomed, and the word "back" quietly admits that the rain has already got out. The line break after "all" helps too. For a beat the wish sounds total, before "my dark rain" arrives to say what is being surrendered. The word "my" matters as well: this is a private climate, not a general sadness.
The second stanza turns on a verb. The speaker would not become a poet but "play" one, as though poetry without the rain were a costume. The plosive p's of "put," "play" and "poet" make the phrase sound a little prissy, almost mouthed. Then comes "insipid," a word we usually apply to weak tea or tasteless food. Pairing it with "ruins" is clever. Ruins are a traditional poetic subject, picturesque decay admired from a safe distance. Rain falls on you, whereas ruins are something you stand and look at. The poem implies that painless poetry would be pretty, decorative and flavourless, with the danger removed from the destruction.
In the last stanza the language becomes plain. "Would I live" ends its line alone, so for an instant it could mean simply survive. Then "only on the road" narrows the thought, and "only" is the key word of the poem. Judging by the imagery, the road suggests motion without an address, and the cost of not being hurt may be never staying anywhere long enough to be touched by it. That is an inference, but it fits the way the poem treats safety as a kind of restriction.
The final line, "and stop being hurt," is the barest in the poem. After "insipid ruins" the vocabulary is blunt and nearly monosyllabic. The passive "being hurt" casts the speaker as a target, someone things happen to. This is the most exposed moment, and it is not mocked. However much the poem teases the idea of a bland, safe poetry, it takes the wish to stop hurting completely seriously.
That balance is what makes the poem worth reading. It would be easy to write a piece insisting that suffering makes art and should be treasured, or one that simply begs for relief. Instead the poem sets the two side by side and lets them pull against each other. The speaker is suspicious of his own possible output and of the romantic idea that pain is the price of good writing, yet he cannot quite wave it away. By ending on a conditional with no punctuation to close it, the poem leaves the reader in the same position as the speaker, holding the box and deciding whether to shut the lid. In so few words it asks what we would be willing to lose in order to feel better, and whether what remained would still be ours.