Eleven words, no punctuation, no capital letters, and still the poem stages a small drama of hospitality. A table stands in the rain. Something eats, and eats "with great ease." Something is the only supper. The poem never says who the diner is, and the title "Guest" is the only clue. The most natural reading is that the rain is the guest. It has arrived uninvited and is calmly helping itself to the speaker's meal.
That reading comes from the syntax, which is the cleverest thing about the poem. Read straight through, the lines form a sentence: rain on my table eating, with great ease, the one supper. The line break after "ease" holds the object back for a beat, so "eating" hangs there as if the rain were simply devouring the table, and then "the one supper" lands as the thing devoured. But the grammar is loose enough to allow a second picture, in which the speaker eats outdoors while rain falls onto the plate. Because the subject of "eating" is never pinned down, host and guest, human and weather, blur into one scene. The poem leaves that blur in place, and the reader has to decide who is sitting at the table.
The sound supports the calm of the scene. The lines run to five, five and four syllables, which makes the poem look and feel like a haiku without strictly following that pattern, and the short last line closes quickly, like a plate being cleared. Nothing rhymes, but the vowels do a quiet job. "Rain," "table" and "great" share a long a, which stretches the opening lines into something unhurried, and "eating" and "ease" share a long e. The word "ease" is itself easy to say, a soft hiss that lets the breath out. Even "supper" ends on a weak, trailing syllable, so the poem does not finish with a bang. It settles, the way a meal does.
The key words repay a closer look. "Table" is the ordinary centre of a household, the place where people are expected to be civil to one another, and putting rain on it makes the outside world arrive inside the ritual of home. Then there is the shift from "my table" to "the one supper." The speaker claims the furniture but not the food. The possessive drops away and a definite article takes its place, as if ownership loosened the moment the meal began to be shared. The word "one" can also be read two ways. It may mean the only supper, a modest and perhaps meagre meal that the rain is taking without any sense of guilt. Or it may mean a single supper shared by everything present, speaker and weather together. The poem supports either reading, which is part of its charm.
"Eating" is also a good verb for rain. Rain does not literally dine, but water wears wood down, and judging by the verb alone, the poem may be hinting at the slow way weather consumes the things we build and set out for ourselves. The phrase "with great ease" then becomes double-edged. It is funny, since the rain behaves like the most relaxed guest ever to sit down. It is also faintly humbling, because the rain is more at home at the table than its owner. Nothing in the tone suggests complaint, though. By calling the intruder a guest, the poem turns what might have been a ruined meal into an act of acceptance, even courtesy.
That is where its significance lies. In three short lines it takes a minor mishap and finds in it an entire attitude: a willingness to treat the natural world as company rather than as an enemy of our plans. It trusts the reader to complete the picture, and the gaps in its grammar are where the thinking happens. The poem is slight on the page but opens outward the longer one looks, which is what compression can do when every word has to carry weight.