Nine short lines of attack on authority, and not one of them raises its voice. "Big man" is the title, wrapped in quotation marks that sound faintly ironic, as if the speaker is repeating a label the man gave himself. The poem then takes him apart in three small stages: his face, his furniture, his victims.
The opening comparison, "commissioner like a hangman," is the most direct charge. A commissioner is an official, someone who signs and decides, and the poem sets him beside the figure who carries out the sentence. The likeness is chilling because the commissioner never touches a rope. His violence is clerical. The next line gives him a body: "face newly entered / into decay." The verb "entered" works two ways. A face can enter a stage of life, but a name or a figure is also entered into a record, and the poem will soon give this man a pen. His rotting is filed like paperwork. The word "newly" suggests the decay has only just begun to show, so the corruption seems to be surfacing from inside him.
The second stanza turns to the objects around him, and here the poem plays with scale. He has a "little pen" and a "great chair." One is tiny and the other enormous, yet the pen is where his power lies and the chair is where he hides it. The chair is "made / for that disease, ease," and the line break between "made" and "for" delays the cruelty just long enough to surprise us. The phrase also splits the word "disease" to reveal "ease" inside it. The sickness is comfort, the dis-ease of someone so well cushioned that other people's suffering never reaches him. The sound does the work too: "disease, ease" is almost a stammer, a word echoing its own hidden half. The chair is built to fit the illness, so the poem hints that the office was designed to breed this kind of man.
The last stanza shows what his power does. He is "there to direct / another wren / toward the owls." The shift to small animals is sudden, and it changes the tone from satire to something closer to fable. A wren is among the smallest of birds, and owls are hunters. What the commissioner "directs" is not clearly a punishment. It could be a signature, a referral, or a sentence passed along with a bored nod, and the poem never says. That vagueness is part of the point, since institutional harm often looks like routine. The word "another" matters most. It tells us this has happened before and will happen again, so the wren is one in a long line. The pen and the wren also rhyme, and since they sit in different stanzas the rhyme is easy to miss. Still, it quietly links the tool to the victim, as though the pen and the wren belong to the same sentence.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no capitals and no end punctuation, built from short lines of a few stresses each. The first stanza is almost all noun phrases, with no main verb. The commissioner is presented as a still image, like a portrait or a specimen. Only in the last stanza does an action appear, and it is an infinitive, "to direct," which describes his purpose and not any event. This fits a man whose whole role is to point other creatures where to go. The vowels also carry the theme: the long *a* in "decay" and "made" gives those lines a slow, sagging weight.
The poem's significance lies in its compression and its refusal to shout. It could have raged against corrupt officials in general. It chooses one detail, a comfortable chair, and trusts it to carry the argument. Evil here is not dramatic. It sits down comfortably, holds a small pen, and gestures toward the owls. Read this way, the poem warns that the people who sign the papers deserve as much suspicion as the people who swing the rope, and that comfort can be a form of decay.