The speaker, a new father, treats birth as a kind of killing. Conception happened "through an accident, / in the rush-hour," and the result is that he has "murdered his death": by creating a child, he has cheated mortality, since the baby will outlive him. Yet the child is also a "grave-eclipsing babe" whose arrival feels like revenge. The speaker says his ambition and his "reason's age" are finished, as if fatherhood has swallowed his old self.
The tone is bitter, dazed, and darkly comic, with the cramped, clipped lines mimicking a mind in shock. His wife, oddly, appears only as "incident" and "mother," which suggests he feels sidelined, or at least strangely distant from the event. In the last lines she sings a "tearful" song at her loom, and the poem turns quieter and sadder. The phrase "for two lives long" hints at a bond between mother and child that lasts a lifetime. The mood is part dread, part wonder, and part grief for what he has lost.