The whole argument of "Owner" is tucked inside its first big word. "Ashamed" already contains "ash," and the next line says so outright: the speaker is ashamed to possess "so much I judge to be ash." Shame and ruin share letters here, and the poem lets them share a feeling too. We are never told what is owned. It could be objects, memories, words or years. The verdict on it comes quickly all the same. The verb "judge" casts the speaker as both owner and magistrate, sentencing his possessions while still holding them. "Possess" also carries a second sense, since to be possessed is to be taken over, and the poem seems to know it.
Then comes the turn: "but am sorry to see / no more of it." The line break after "see" lets the phrase hang for a moment, and the ending can be read two ways. The speaker may be sorry that there is no more to have, a hunger for the very thing he despises. Or he may be sorry to watch it dwindle, a grief at loss. Either way he contradicts himself, ashamed of having too much and sorry not to have more. The poem doesn't resolve this. It suggests that ownership is an appetite that carries on regardless of our judgment of it.
The final couplet, "like the sport / I know as hurt," turns that feeling into a simile. "Sport" suggests play, contest and pleasure, but it can also mean being someone's plaything, as when we say something is made sport of. The speaker "knows" the word differently, and "know" is a verb of experience rather than opinion. He sets his own definition beside the dictionary's: the word says sport, but I know it as hurt. The sound backs him up. "Sport" and "hurt" form the poem's only real rhyme, and a slightly rough one, since they share only the "r" and "t" while the vowels differ. After four lines without any rhyme, the sudden matching of sounds clicks shut like a trap. Pleasure and pain are made to sound alike.
The shape of the poem works quietly toward the same effect. It is three couplets, and the lines shrink as they go. Counting syllables, they run seven, seven, six, four, three, four. The poem burns down as we read it, leaving a short, ashy last line. There is no punctuation at all, not even a full stop after "hurt," so the thought trails off without being settled. The vocabulary is almost entirely one-syllable words. Only "ashamed," "possess" and "sorry" are longer, and those three carry the weight of ownership and feeling. Everything else is plain and quick, like a confession said under the breath. The first stanza also hisses with sibilance, in "ashamed," "possess," "so," "judge" and "ash." It sounds like embers settling, or like someone hushing himself.
The title is worth a second look. "Owner" is a flat, administrative word, the kind that appears on a deed or a form. It names a role, not a feeling. By the end the poem has shown how little that label covers, because the owner turns out to be owned by shame, appetite and loss.
The poem is significant because it gets so much from so little. In six short lines it holds an ethical judgment and a contrary craving without choosing between them, and it avoids both preaching about possessions and boasting about renouncing them. The reader has to decide what "it" is, whether that is things, people or time. The poem's honesty lies in admitting that knowing something is ash doesn't stop us grieving when it goes. It is a small, uncomfortable truth, and the rhyme of "sport" with "hurt" fixes it in memory.