Nobody in this poem is in a hurry, least of all the speaker. In eight short lines a man announces that he is tired, unwashed, pleased by an ex's discomfort, and off to France to write letters home. The romantic image of the writer abroad is all here: the foreign country, the pen, the drink. But every piece has been knocked down a peg. The drink is bad cider, the writing is letters rather than a masterpiece, and the artistic gesture is a drawn rose. The central idea is that exile can be a role you slip into as much as a place you travel to, and that the poem knows how scruffy and slightly absurd that role looks up close.
The opening simile sets the tone. "Weary as a clock" is an odd comparison, because clocks don't tire. They run down, tick on, repeat themselves. The image suggests a man wound down by routine, and the next line borrows the clock's vocabulary: a clock *keeps* time, and the speaker "neglect[s] keeping clean." The hard k sounds in "clock," "neglect," "keeping" and "clean" tick through the lines like a small mechanism, even as the sense describes things falling apart.
The second couplet is the most playful. "A louse vexed the ex" works through sound as much as sense: the clipped *x* of "vexed" and "ex" snaps the line shut. "Louse" could be the insect itself, the natural consequence of not washing, or a contemptible person, and the poem lets both meanings stand. It is also unclear whether the speaker is the louse. What is clear is the satisfaction. "And me well pleased" drops its verb and borrows the stiff cadence of an old formula, which gives a petty victory a comic grandeur. The "ex" also echoes the title, since "expat" begins with the same syllable. Judging by the wordplay, the speaker is someone who has gone *out of* things, whether a country, a relationship or a tidy way of life, and does not seem to mind.
The second half of the poem changes in sound as well as scene. The first four lines are full of long *ee* vowels (weary, keeping, clean, me, pleased), a slightly drawn-out, drowsy music. After that the long *o* takes over, and it links three key words: "rose," "go" and "home." The poem has no end rhymes, no punctuation and no capital letters, so its lines run on like items on a list of idle habits. "I draw a rose / drink a glass of bad cider" sounds like a daily routine, and "and go to France" arrives in the same offhand way, as if crossing a border were just one more thing to be done before lunch. The poem never settles whether the speaker is leaving or has already arrived. The drawing and drinking may be the journey, and the France may be partly imagined.
The line lengths do their own quiet work. They range from seven syllables ("drink a glass of bad cider") down to three, and the shortest line comes last. The break after "to write" leaves the verb hanging for a beat, as if the speaker's purpose were being weighed, before "letters home" lands. That last word carries the poem's irony. The whole point of leaving was apparently to be elsewhere, yet the writing is addressed back to the place left behind. "Letters" also hints at literature in general, and it is tempting to read this compact, casual poem as one of those letters, a dispatch sent home to say that all is well, or well enough.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much attitude it fits into so little space. It sketches a whole type, the slovenly, self-dramatizing wanderer, in a handful of images, and it manages to be funny without sneering. The speaker is mocked (the lice, the bad cider, the unwashed clock-weary body), but he is also "well pleased," and the poem seems to share some of his contentment. It deflates the myth of the writer in exile and still lets him enjoy it. That balance of affection and irony, held in eight unpunctuated lines, is what gives the poem its charm.