A hundred years is about the most generous length a life could be given, and this poem opens by asking what it is worth. Its answer arrives only at the very end: nothing, unless someone is there to share it. The whole thought takes fourteen words, and each word gets a line to itself.
Fourteen is also the number of lines in a sonnet, a form long tied to love and argument. Whether that is deliberate, the text can't tell us, but the effect is hard to ignore. It reads like a sonnet with everything inessential burned away, leaving one question where the form would usually spread out into elaborate persuasion. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The rhythm comes entirely from the pauses the layout forces on us. Because every word sits alone, the reader can't skim. "What's / the / matter / of / living" arrives in slow, separate steps, and the delay makes the question sound less like a debate and more like a person speaking hesitantly, perhaps with difficulty.
The stretch "one / hundred / years" is the most telling moment of the structure. A century is spread across three lines, so the reader spends a little real time getting through it, and the length of the life is felt on the page. Then comes the poem's only internal punctuation, the comma after "years," a small breath before the condition arrives: "if / can't / share / them / with / you?" The question mark is held back until the final word, so the sentence stays open the whole way down. The thought isn't resolved until the last word, "you."
The grammar adds to this. The phrase "if can't share them" has no subject. The "I" who cannot share is missing from the sentence, and in fact the speaker never appears in the poem at all. The only person named is "you," and that word comes last. The absence of "I" is the loneliness the poem describes. A speaker without a companion is reduced to a gap in the grammar. The credited author's name does something similar: P N C L S C R P T is a row of consonants with every vowel removed. Read with the vowels put back, it could be "pencil script," though that is only a guess. Either way, the missing letters echo the poem's idea of something essential left out.
The title's wording also suggests a numbered series, which would make this one piece among others, but nothing in the text tells us more, so it is better to stay with what is on the page.
Word choice repays attention too. "Matter" is doing double work. In "what's the matter of living," it means roughly "what is the point, what does it count for?" But "what's the matter?" is also what we ask someone who looks upset, so a faint note of concern hovers over the line, as if the poem were asking what is wrong and answering in the same breath. "Share" is the poem's one verb of action, and it turns the years into something that can be handed over, like food or a coat. Time becomes a possession that has meaning only when it is given away. The sounds quietly agree. "Years" and "you" both begin with the same y sound, so the thing being measured and the person it is measured against are linked at the level of breath, and both words end the poem's two final movements with a long, open sound that lingers.
Almost every word is a plain, short one, and that matters. Nothing in the poem is decorated or showy, so the feeling can't be mistaken for performance. A line like "one hundred years" sounds like arithmetic, and the poem sets that arithmetic against the unmeasurable thing at its end.
What makes the poem significant is how completely its form carries its meaning. It makes a familiar claim, that love matters more than length of life, but it makes the reader feel the claim through slowness, delay and a missing subject, not just hear it. The open "you" also lets the poem fit many situations: a lover, a friend, a parent, or the reader who has reached the last line and been addressed directly. That openness is why such a small poem can feel so large.