Some poems about growing older mourn what has been lost. "A New Way" does something odder: it shrugs, grins and starts inventing words. The speaker has "noticed a new way to be on a bed, with or without you," and the casual phrase "with or without you" sets the tone. The poem treats a big change, apparently the cooling of desire, as a mild discovery rather than a catastrophe. Who "you" is stays open. It could be a partner, or, judging by the second half of the opening stanza, the speaker's own body, addressed like an unruly old acquaintance.
That stanza builds its image from a theatre. The critics once "sat on my forehead's balcony," so the mind becomes an auditorium and the body the stage below. They used to look down "wantonly," and to "clap their hands to make you come to attention." The phrase "come to attention" is a deliberate double meaning, military and bodily, and the poem plays it with a straight face. Now the audience has stopped watching. Even the closing gesture is shaded by death: hands standing "together in prayerful effigy" suggest a carved figure on a tomb. The effigy hints that this is partly a poem about mortality, but it is a joke made in passing, not a lament.
The second stanza turns from the body to language, and the poem's energy goes with it. The speaker keeps "rolling out new thoughts in nouny shapes," then proves it with a small parade of invented or stretched nouns: "Saladness, sundriness, doneness, agedom, almosthood." Each takes something fleeting, such as a mood, a leftover or a near miss, and fixes it into a thing you can hold. "Almosthood" is the best of them, a whole state of being made from "almost." Read in order, the list drifts from the kitchen ("saladness," "doneness") toward age ("agedom") and ends on incompletion. The sounds help. The repeated *s* and the heavy *-ness* endings give the line a soft, shuffling rhythm, like someone muttering over a collection.
The speaker then feels guilty toward the words that missed out: "I am sad at my meanness to words never nouned / yellowing there in the hot draught of time." The yellowing evokes old paper, and the "hot draught" feels like a stuffy room. It is the poem's one flash of real sadness, and it is aimed at vocabulary rather than at the body. That shift is the central idea. As physical appetite loosens its grip, the appetite for language takes over, and the speaker treats unused words with the tenderness once kept for people.
The final stanza widens the lens and cools the tone further. "I have found new areas of indifference" sounds like an admission, yet "areas" makes indifference sound like territory to be explored, almost a hobby. Then comes a domestic cosmos: the speaker twists and settles "the sky's lid / on the earth's pan." The sky becomes a saucepan lid, which connects back to "doneness" and "saladness" and gives the poem a cooking undertone. Nothing is ablaze here, only simmering and covered. Even flirtation survives, but it has drifted outward to "passing houses, people, organizations." The list ends on its most deflating item, since nobody flirts with an organization, and the comedy comes from that anticlimax. Desire has not vanished so much as spread thin, from one person to the whole indifferent world.
Formally the poem is free verse in three stanzas of five, four and four lines, with no regular rhyme. Its long, talkative lines suit a voice thinking aloud. The word "new" keeps returning ("a new way," "new thoughts," "new areas," "new ways," "new fashions"), and its repetition is faintly ironic, because the novelty it announces is really the arrival of age.
What makes the poem worth reading is that tone. It avoids both self-pity and false cheer, and it lets a quiet loss become a source of invention. By the end, the speaker has lost an audience but gained a workshop, and the poem is a clear demonstration of that trade.