Nothing in "Amputee" is explained, and that is where its force comes from. In nine short lines, a man wakes from an operation, and then the poem leaves him and sends its eye out to a river full of ships. The story is a single event: a leg has been taken, and a man has to come back into a world that has changed shape around him. The central idea is that a loss like this does not stay private. It spreads outward until it seems to be the condition of everything.
The first stanza sets the scene with almost no help. "High wind" is not a sentence, only a noise at the window, a piece of weather placed before any person appears. Then comes "the sick man waked and gargled." The old-fashioned "waked" makes the waking feel slow and heavy, and "gargled" is a wonderful, awkward verb: he makes sound without speech, the wet, helpless noise of a throat after sleep or drugs. The stanza ends on "his leg cut off," which has no verb of its own and simply hangs there. We never learn who did the cutting. The loss is presented the way the man must first meet it, as a fact already finished before he was awake to object.
The second stanza turns on language itself: "he will not know how to talk." The line is ambiguous in a useful way. It can mean he will be unable to speak for a while, as the gargling suggests, or that he will not know how to speak *about* what has happened. Losing a leg and losing words become the same kind of damage. Then the poem makes its leap: "ships coming into the river / like galleries for loss." A gallery can be a long room for displaying things, a balcony for onlookers, or even a passage cut underground. Each meaning fits. The ships become exhibition halls of loss, arriving slowly, one after another. The long, open vowels of "ships coming into the river" make the line itself glide in like a hull.
In the last stanza the syntax starts to give way. "How they have carried at / so large a bargain / all things" breaks off on the small word "at," as though the sentence stumbles under its own weight. "Carried" quietly joins the ships to the man, since an amputee is someone who must now be carried or must learn to carry himself differently. "Bargain" is the strangest word here. It suggests trade and cargo, which suits the ships, but it also hints that the man's leg was the price paid in some exchange, perhaps for his life. Whether "so large a bargain" is a good deal or a ruinous one the poem leaves open. The final phrase, "all things," widens the focus as far as it can go. The ships carry everything, and the implication is that everything has a price.
The poem has no rhyme and almost no punctuation, and its lines vary in length without settling into a metre. What binds it instead is sound. Notice how a hard *g* runs through the poem: *leg*, *gargled*, *galleries*, *large*, *bargain*. It begins in the man's throat and ends in the language of commerce, so the body and the marketplace are connected without a word of explanation. The poem's fragmented grammar, with its missing verbs and its dangling "at," also reads as an echo of the man's broken speech, though that is an inference from the text rather than anything the poem states.
What makes "Amputee" significant for a reader is how much it trusts us. It does not describe pain or invite pity. It places a wounded body beside a busy river and lets the two images work on each other. The title is the only place the word for what happened appears, which fits a poem about the difficulty of finding words for loss. A reader who finishes it may find that the ships feel less like scenery than like an answer: loss is not rare or hidden, but something the whole world is quietly, continually carrying in.