Night doesn't fall in "Recluse"; it lands. The opening, "down comes night / like a severe fly," swaps the usual grandeur of dusk for something small, buzzing and faintly disgusting. The inverted word order ("down comes") sounds almost like a ballad, and then "severe" spoils the comparison. Flies aren't severe, but schoolmasters and judges are. Darkness becomes a pest with a stern face, something that settles on the speaker and can't quite be swatted away. The image is both comic and bleak, and the poem keeps both moods going to the end.
What follows is a portrait of a shrunken life. The speaker "never" sees "more than the ugly street / and a couple of pigeons all day." The language is flat as a complaint, with "ugly," "never" and "all day" and no metaphor to soften them. The word "couple" is quietly loaded, though, because the poem is built entirely from couplets, five pairs of lines wrapped around someone who has no partner. The form is arranged in twos while the speaker is alone.
Then the poem lurches. "light over the fields puts me in mind / of when I used to shoot." The setting jumps from street to open country, and the tense from present to past. "Shoot" refuses to settle. It could mean hunting, photography, or something more violent, and the poem won't say. The line break after "in mind" lets the thought trail off, and "used to" shuts the door on whatever it was. That one word also colours the end of the poem. A "chamber" is a private room, but it is also the part of a gun that holds the bullet. Judging by the imagery, that echo is probably not an accident, though it stays a suggestion rather than a statement.
The pivot of the poem is its pun: "and a pretty wife lies with / so many lies." The break leaves "lies with" hanging for a moment, suggesting a bed and a partner, before the next line turns it into falsehood. The article matters too. It is "a pretty wife," not "my wife," as though marriage were remembered as a type rather than a person. Whether she is the speaker's own, the poem never confirms. The sentence also begins with "and," attached to nothing. The grammar has stopped linking one thought to the next, which is how a mind behaves when nothing interrupts it for days.
The poem has no end rhyme. It is free verse, lowercase and unpunctuated, and the only capital letters are the two "I"s. The self is the one thing left standing upright. Sound does the work rhyme might have done. The long "i" runs through "night," "like," "fly," "I," "mind," "lies" and "midnight," a thin whine that never quite goes away, like the fly itself. The rhythm is close to speech, in short lines of about three or four stresses. "Severe fly" puts two stresses side by side, so the line lands with a small thud.
The ending brings back the opening. Night returns as "midnight," and the speaker climbs to his "chamber," a grand old word set against the "ugly street." Then comes the fragment "that grace." Without a verb, it can't be pinned down. It might be a grudging blessing on solitude, a dinner-table prayer said to nobody, a sneer, or a memory of the wife's elegance now curdled by the lies. The poem leaves all of these open.
Its significance lies in how much it fits into ten short lines. Many poems about loneliness describe a mood. "Recluse" builds a mind: jumpy, sardonic, haunted, linking one scrap to the next by sound and pun instead of logic. The seams between the couplets show, and the poem reads as though assembled from fragments. That suits a speaker whose life has been reduced to pieces too. It also shows students that what a poem leaves out, such as a verb, a name or an explanation, can say as much as what it includes.