The joke in "Age Concern" depends on a misunderstanding, and Steve J Waterfield lets us watch it grow before it bursts. A man standing on a train notices a woman smiling at him. He decides this can mean only one thing, and he is wrong. She is not flirting. She is about to give him her seat. The poem's central idea is the gap between how we see ourselves and how others see us, and how a gesture of pure kindness can land as an insult when it exposes the very thing we hoped no one had noticed.
The first stanza is all escalation. The verb "smiles" turns up four times in four lines, and each time the speaker raises the stakes: "She smiles at me. And then she smiles again," then "Smiling at me!", then "She smiles once more." The repetition shows how eagerly he is counting. Every smile is another piece of evidence for a case he has already decided to win. Even his phrase "speaking with her eyes" is borrowed from the stock language of romance, which tells us he is reading his own life as a love story. The detail that sets up the joke sits in the opening line, almost unnoticed: he is "standing on the train." We are told right away why a stranger might look at him with concern, but he never makes the connection, and we see it only afterwards.
The form helps the trick work. The poem is two quatrains of rhyming couplets (train/again, eyes/rise, man/fan, treat/seat), and the lines run to a steady ten syllables with a loose, talky iambic beat. That regularity gives the poem the bounce of a told joke, and each couplet closes like a small door. The word "rise" is the hinge. In stanza one it feels like the start of her approach, the moment he has been waiting for. Only in the last line do we learn she is rising to vacate a seat. The same action means two opposite things, depending on whether you are the vain man or the polite woman.
The second stanza brings in the speaker's inner voice, set in quotation marks: "you've still got it man!" and "Looks like you've got a fan". He talks to himself in a mate-to-mate slang that sounds slightly younger than the situation deserves. The word "fan" turns a stranger's smile into applause, as if he were a performer. The exclamation marks do a lot of work too. The first two express his delight, and the last one, after "her seat!", expresses the collapse of that delight. The same punctuation carries both the swagger and the humiliation.
The phrase "brings me down a treat" is the sharpest wording in the poem. It plays on the British idiom "go down a treat," meaning to be a great success, but twists it so that what goes down is the speaker himself. "Treat" is bitterly ironic here, because the treat is a seat, and the seat is the insult. There is a physical pun as well. She "rise[s]" while he is "brought down," so her small movement upward is matched by his deflation. We never hear her words, only that "she speaks," which makes her seem calm and unaware of the damage. She has done nothing wrong, and that is what makes the moment funny.
The title adds a final layer. "Age Concern" reads as a description of the scene, since she is concerned about his age, but it also sounds like the name of a well-known British charity for older people, which fits the speaker's sense that he has just been treated as a case for help. The poem never states his age, though. We infer it from her reaction, and that is cleverly done, because he is the one who tells the story. The poem is funny partly because he is honest enough to report his own embarrassment.
The poem's significance lies in how much it does with so little. It is a tiny anecdote told in eight lines, but it captures something everyone recognises: the shock of being seen from outside. It also lets the reader laugh at the speaker without being cruel, because his vanity is gentle and his self-mockery is part of the telling.