Nobody in these four lines picks up a spear, yet the scene still smells faintly of a kill. The speaker has just finished dinner, and the title, "Paleolithic diet," tells us what kind: the modern fashion for eating as early humans supposedly did, heavy on meat. The poem never names the food. It offers "a gory victual" and lets us picture a rare steak or something bloodier. What follows is the speaker's hope "to get thin / being full of solution." The central idea is a joke with a sting in it. A person who has eaten like a cave-dweller now pins his hopes on the most modern notion of all, that the body is a chemical system and weight is a problem with a tidy answer.
Everything turns on the final word. "Solution" works in two ways at once. It is an answer to a problem, which is exactly how diets are sold. It is also a liquid in which something has been dissolved, a fair description of what happens to dinner once digestion begins. The speaker imagines the meal melting away and himself thinning out with it. The word's Latin root, *solvere*, means to loosen or dissolve, so the pun is built into its history. There is a hint of the idiom "full of it" too, a faint self-mockery that the poem never states. And "being full" sits oddly beside "get thin." Fullness, normally the enemy of slimness, is recast as the means of it.
The poem is built as one sentence, cut in half by the stanza break. Unpunctuated and without capital letters, it runs: after dinner, having had a gory victual, I hope to get thin, being full of solution. The "I" is held back until the third line, so the first stanza is all setting, a table and a leftover taste. Each couplet pairs a short line with a longer one, roughly four syllables against eight, then five against seven. Both longer lines are participial phrases, "having had" and "being full," and together they sound like the speaker justifying himself: because I have eaten this, because I am full of that. The reasoning is just slightly off, which is where the comedy lives. There is no rhyme to tidy things up. The poem ends on the word "solution" and simply stops, with no neat click of closure.
Sound does some quiet work as well. The first couplet is hard and crunchy. "Gory" and "victual" are full of stopped consonants, and "victual" is spelled like a Latin import but pronounced "vittle," a little like a bite taken. In the second couplet the sounds go soft and liquid: the *l* in "full," and the *s* and *sh* of "solution." The poem's sound seems to dissolve along with the meal.
The vocabulary is a small history of eating. "Victual" is an old-fashioned word for food, and the singular form is unusual, since we normally meet the word as "victuals." That makes it sound like one particular lump of flesh. "Gory" carries battlefields and horror films. "Solution" belongs to the laboratory. Between these sits the plainest line in the poem, "I hope to get thin," an ordinary human wish in everyday words. In a handful of syllables we move from the ancient hunt, through a quaint archaic word, to the science lab, with a modest, slightly vain person standing in the middle of it all. The verb matters too. The speaker says "I hope," not "I know," and that small humility makes him likeable and a little absurd.
The poem is worth reading because it packs so much into so little. It does not lecture about diet culture or about the fantasy of returning to a primal state. It lets one pun suggest how impossible the return is. We can order the bloody meat, but we still eat it at "dinner," afterwards, and we still think about it in terms of results and solutions. The primitive appetite and the modern calculation sit in the same stomach. The last word is both punchline and quiet observation: whatever we eat, we end up trying to turn ourselves into something that dissolves.