Before the poem has said anything, it has already made a pun. "Wake and break" sounds like the start of a morning, with waking and daybreak, but a wake is also the vigil kept over the dead, and things that break include hearts, silences and promises. The four lines that follow hold both readings at once: an ordinary getting-up, and a quiet mourning.
The construction is simple. There are two stanzas of two lines each, and both open with the same words, "up and to". The poem uses no punctuation and no capital letters, as if it were being half-muttered. The phrase "up and to" is deliberately unfinished. We know the idioms it recalls, such as "up and about" or "up and doing", and we expect a destination like work, breakfast or the day. Instead the first stanza delivers "my lies / the sad stuff of being". The speaker rises, but toward his own falsehoods. The word "lies" is also slippery. It is a noun for untruths, but it is also what a body does when it is laid out, which brings the funeral sense of "wake" back in. The speaker might be getting up to face his self-deceptions, or he might be the one who lies still.
The second stanza swaps one kind of language for another. "Discourse" is a stiff, Latinate word in a poem of short plain ones, and it sits oddly after "up and to", as if the speaker has been dragged out of bed into formal conversation. Lies and discourse are both forms of speech, and the poem seems to suggest that the first thing we do on waking is start talking, to others and to ourselves, and that this talking is not wholly honest. Each stanza also changes its second line in a telling way. "The sad stuff of being" becomes "the matter with being gone". "Stuff" and "matter" are near-synonyms, and the shift from the shrugging, almost dismissive "stuff" to "matter" is a small tightening. "The matter with" is also the phrase we use when asking what is wrong, so the line sounds like a diagnosis. Meanwhile "matter" is physical substance, which gives absence a strange weight. "Being" has become "being gone", and the poem has moved from existing to not existing in a single step.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no regular metre. The lines run to roughly five, six, five and seven syllables, so the last one is a little longer, as if the thought trails off. The only full rhyme is in the title, where "wake" and "break" chime. The body of the poem never answers that chime, and its line endings, "lies", "being", "discourse" and "gone", are all unrhymed and open. The expected click of closure is withheld, which suits the subject. The sibilance of "lies", "sad stuff" and "discourse" gives the lines a hushed, sighing texture. The poem ends on "gone", a flat, final syllable with nothing after it.
The imagery is abstract rather than visual. There is no window, light or bed, only a few nouns that carry their feeling by themselves. Judging by the text, this is deliberate: the poem takes the groggy moment of waking, when the mind has not yet put itself in order, and shows it as already full of large questions. Who or what is "gone" is never said. It could be a person, a former self, or the speaker's own eventual absence, and the poem leaves that open.
Its central idea seems to be that waking is a small breaking, a return to a self made of lies and sadness, shadowed by the fact of loss. What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. Four lines and a title are enough to hold a pun, a shift from plain to formal language, and a slide from "being" to "being gone". The unfinished "up and to" also asks the reader to supply what is missing, and what each reader supplies is part of the poem's meaning.