Seven short lines are enough to take apart the idea that a life adds up to something. The poem opens in the world of business: "the company will go on / money walking when we lay down." The grammar is a little loose, as if the sentence were spoken rather than written, and that looseness is useful. Money is given legs and keeps moving, while the human "we" is the one that "lay[s] down." That could mean going to sleep or going to our death. The title, "Estate," pushes toward death, since an estate is what remains once its owner is gone. The word also has an older sense of a person's condition or station in life, so the title quietly asks both what we leave behind and what state we are in.
Then comes "but," and the poem turns from ledgers to a question: "what are we to God / or to a fox." There is no question mark. Nothing in the poem is punctuated, and it is all lowercase, so the thought seems to drift in rather than be announced. The question also flattens a hierarchy. God and a fox sit in the same line, joined by a plain "or," as if they were equally valid places from which to be looked at, and equally likely to look back without interest.
The next stanza keeps the same grammar, "to the hound when / we call her home," and the list runs on through repeated "to" phrases. The fox and the hound are a traditional pair of pursued and pursuer, so the poem may be placing us beside both. Still, the hound is the poem's pivot. She is the one creature who has a name for us, in effect, because she answers a call. The line break after "when" holds back the tenderest phrase, "we call her home," and gives it a line of its own. "Home" is the opposite of "estate." An estate is property that outlives us, while home is a place a dog runs toward because someone is waiting.
Sound reinforces this. "Company" and "money" share the same short "u" and the same light "-ny" ending, so the words of commerce chime with each other and slide along smoothly. After them the poem's key words arrive as heavy single syllables: "God," "fox," "hound," "home," "dark." The natural world is blunt and solid by comparison, and the language slows down to match.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are short, speech-like and uneven, and the shape of the poem does the remaining work. The stanzas run two lines, two, two, and then one. The final stanza, "to oysters in the dark," is a single line with no verb and no full stop, so the poem ends in the dark it names. Oysters are a startling last choice. They have no faces, no voices and no way of responding to us. The familiar saying "the world is your oyster" is turned inside out, because here we are nothing to the oyster at all. Oysters also produce pearls, a kind of wealth made in the dark with no interest in owners. That is an inference, but it would let the poem end where it began, with value that carries on without us.
The poem is significant because it refuses two consolations at once. The first is the permanence of money and institutions, which the opening stanza treats as a cold continuity that has no use for us. The second is cosmic importance, since God comes first in the list yet is given no more weight than a fox or a shellfish. Even so, the poem does not simply declare that we are nothing. It leaves its question open, and the one warm moment, the hound coming when she is called, suggests that whatever mattering we have is small and close at hand. Judging by the imagery, the poem finds worth in the creature that comes when we call, not in the company that outlasts us or in any answer from above, and it takes only seven lines to say so.