Most poems about anger want someone to blame. "This anger" does something less common: it points the finger inward. The speaker's fire sizzles "in my veins," and the key admission comes in a line so short it is easy to miss: "And I let it." The verdict that follows is flat and unadorned: "That is my mistake." Nobody else is accused. The poem is about the odd loyalty we can feel towards an emotion that hurts us. Its central idea is that anger, once held in and fed, becomes a private punishment that no one else can see.
The fire metaphor carries the whole poem, and it is handled with some care. Fire "consumes" and leads the speaker "stray," like a light drawing a traveller off the path. "Sizzle" is a striking choice. It is a small, kitchen-table sound, a little ugly, and it puts the flames inside the body, in the blood. In the first stanza the fire is the active force. In the second the grammar changes hands: "I let the fire burn / And often feed its flames." The speaker now supplies the verbs. The word "let" appears twice and "often" twice, once in each of the first two stanzas, which suggests a habit rather than a single lapse. The speaker has been here before.
The most unsettling line is "Even though it burns me, the pain stays the same." There is no escalation and no relief, only a dull sameness. The line captures the logic of resentment, where feeding the feeling neither cures nor kills it. The speaker seems almost tired of being hurt.
Then the poem moves into a bedroom, and the scene is vivid for something so spare. The speaker cries "at my bed's feet," not in the bed. That is the position of someone who has collapsed or who is half-praying, and judging by the final line of the stanza, it is night. "Everyone sleeps soundly, unaware of my torment." "Soundly" is a gentle word, and it sits against "sizzle" and "burn" like cold water against a hot pan. Fire is loud from the inside and silent from the outside, and the poem lives in that gap.
The last stanza is the shortest, as if the poem has run low on fuel. It opens with a small, troubling hint: the pain is invisible "unless caught up with in its heat." Perhaps anger can burn people nearby too, although the poem does not pursue the thought. Instead it returns to the speaker in the final line, "I'm the one scorn by it's heat." The word "scorn" reads like a slip for "scorched," but the slip is interesting. Scorn means contempt, so the line can also suggest that the speaker feels despised, perhaps by themselves, as well as burned. That double meaning is an inference, but it fits the poem's habit of turning blame inward.
In form this is free verse. There is no rhyme scheme, and the stanzas shrink from four lines to five to three. Instead of rhyme there is a recurring long "a" sound, in "stray," "flames," "mistake" and "same," which gives the poem a low drone, like something that will not stop. The short lines ("And I let it," "That is my mistake") work as hinges, and the longest line is saved for the ending, which trails off without a full stop and leaves the situation unresolved. The rough edges of the punctuation, such as "lead,s" and "see's," make the text feel unrevised, closer to something written while the feeling was still hot. Whatever their cause, they suit a poem about an emotion that refuses to be tidy.
We know nothing about "mouse" beyond the name, so the poem has to stand alone, and it does. Its significance lies in its honesty. It offers no cure, no lesson and no calming final image. It stays inside one moment of recognition: I know what I am doing, and I am doing it anyway. Many readers will know that moment, and the poem gives it a clear shape.