Five short lines, and the speaker sounds almost cheerful about a very strange operation. The poem imagines the head as a mine and the ear as the tool that breaks into it. The idea is that taking in the world, or perhaps making something from it, is a form of extraction, and the ground being dug up is the person doing the listening. What comes out may be valuable ("gold and silver"), but the final line admits the price: "losing a little more of my head."
It opens with a flat, confident metaphor: "the ear is a trepan." The word does a lot of work. A trepan is an instrument for boring through the skull, and as I understand it the same word is also used for a heavy boring tool in mining. So the single noun joins the surgeon's theatre to the mineshaft before the poem has said anything about mines. The next line carries on the thought in the language of necessity: "the skull must be open for mining." Nobody is named as doing the opening, and the passive "must be" makes the procedure sound like a requirement, even a bargain. If you want the ore, you have to let the drill in. The ear fits this picture well because it is the one sense organ with no lid. We can close our eyes, but we cannot shut our ears, so the way in is always open.
The title is where the poem turns slippery. A prospector is someone who searches for deposits, which suggests the speaker is the hunter. Yet the head being mined is "my head," which makes the speaker the landscape as well. The poem never settles who holds the drill. It could be a person listening hard to find something worth keeping, or a person being worn away by what pours in. Both readings can stand, and the poem is better for not choosing.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter, and it uses no punctuation or capital letters. Even so, it is carefully shaped. The first line has a nearly iambic fall, "the EAR is a TREpan," ending on the hard stop of "pan." The second stanza begins with a balanced pair of pairs: "gold and silver / noon and night." The repeated "and" gives it the swing of a pendulum, and the pairs map onto each other, gold with the sun at noon and silver with the moon at night. Precious metals become the colours of light, and the digging, it seems, goes on round the clock. Nothing in the poem says so directly, but this is what the pairing suggests. The mine has no closing time.
Sound shapes the ending too. After the clipped, tidy pairs, the last line sprawls: "losing a little more of my head." The liquid *l* sounds in "losing" and "little" make the line slide, as though something is draining away, and it comes to rest on the blunt, heavy word "head." Its phrasing also carries an ordinary idiom, since "losing your head" means losing your composure, so a literal loss and a mental one overlap. The phrase "a little more" matters as well. It tells us this is not a single event but a gradual, repeated process, and that earlier losses have already happened. The two -ing words, "mining" in line two and "losing" in line five, work like bookends. Both are unfinished actions, the first the cause and the last the effect.
There is also a quiet change in grammar. The first three lines are impersonal statements about "the ear" and "the skull," almost like a diagram in a manual. Only in the final line does "my" arrive, and with it the personal stake. The reader is walked through the procedure coolly, then reminded whose head is on the table. The deadpan tone makes this more unsettling than a dramatic complaint would be, and it leaves a trace of dark humour.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it compresses into so little. In about twenty words it joins medicine, mining, the senses and the cost of attention, and it does so without explaining itself. It leaves a question for the reader to answer: is the treasure worth the loss of "a little more" each time?