Six lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and a title that insults its own speaker: "Old bore." Before the poem begins, the man in it has already written himself off. What follows is a short, strange accounting of a life. The speaker is a dull lecturer, a captain who has lost his ship, and a man who has ended up in "a sad home." The central idea is that loss can leave a person with an odd kind of wisdom, and that this wisdom feels like no consolation at all. The speaker has gone numb, and evening arrives as a wound.
The poem is built from three couplets, and each one takes a step down. In the first, the speaker is a social failure, someone who talks while others stop listening. In the second, the failure is practical: he has "lost the ship" and "ended in a sad home." In the third, it is emotional: "I am not able to miss." The poem moves from reputation to circumstance to feeling, each time a little further inside him.
The syntax is the most interesting thing about it. "a dull lecturer / am I a better captain" can be read two ways because there is no punctuation to settle it. It might be a statement with inverted word order: a dull lecturer am I, a better captain. Or it might be a question: am I a better captain, having lost the ship? The next couplet then supplies "having lost the ship" as an answer or an excuse, and the sentence slides across the stanza break without anyone deciding what it means. The doubt is part of the point. The speaker cannot tell whether his loss has taught him anything, or whether "better captain" is only a joke he tells against himself. Either way, the irony is cruel. A captain is defined by his ship, and a ship's captain who has lost it is only a man with a title. The lecturer is a similar figure, someone whose authority depends on an audience. Both roles are hollow now.
The image of the ship carries the strongest implication. Captains who lose ships are usually shipwrecked, but the speaker's version is quieter: he has "ended in a sad home." The verb "ended" makes the home sound like a place where a voyage runs aground, not a place anyone chose. The repeated "having" at the start of both lines gives these two losses a flat, record-keeping rhythm, as if he were reading out the charges against himself. Its steady drone also fits the poem's idea of boredom.
The last couplet changes the pace. "evening like a great wound" is the only simile in the poem, and it comes without warning. Evening suggests the red of a sunset, but it also suggests the late stage of a life, and the word "great" makes the image bigger than anything the speaker has said about himself so far. After so much understatement, this is the one place where pain is allowed to look large.
Then comes the final line, whose key word is "miss." "I am not able to miss" can mean he can no longer feel longing for what he lost, which is a sad numbness. It can also mean he cannot fail to see the wound, that it is too big to overlook. A single verb holds both an absence of feeling and an unavoidable presence of pain. The two readings do not cancel each other out. They describe the same condition from opposite sides: someone who feels too little and cannot escape what he does feel.
There is no rhyme here, and the lines are short, running to about five to seven syllables. Soft repeated sounds (the short "i" of "ship" and "miss," the heavy "o" of "lost" and "not") quietly tie the middle of the poem to its end. Without rhyme to round things off, the poem simply stops, and the stopping feels like the speaker's own exhaustion.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It begins with a joke at the speaker's expense and ends with a line that will not settle, and in between it never asks for pity. It trusts a handful of plain words, a lost ship and a great wound among them, to carry a whole life, and leaves the reader to decide how much of the speaker's self-mockery is armor.