The poem imagines what money becomes inside a prison, where it seems to lose its usual power. The opening lines call it "quiet," like "a wine with no wine": the shape of something that promises pleasure but delivers nothing. Scrip, the poem's title, is a substitute currency, and the poem plays with that idea of stand-ins and imitations.
The second stanza turns toward cleansing. Being "clean again" with only "sand lodgings" suggests a bare, scoured existence, stripped of comfort. Then the speaker begins to speak directly, asking a "brother" for "my fear money," as if fear itself were something owed or traded. In the last lines, the speaker offers to lend "hope money at home" to themselves, which suggests hope can only be borrowed from one's own inner life.
The mood is sparse, strange, and quietly desperate. The poem doesn't explain itself, and its odd phrasing makes money feel less like cash and more like a measure of feeling: fear, hope, and the small ways a person survives confinement.