A man wanders among the graves and seems almost to boast about how little he is doing. That joke opens a poem that ends somewhere much colder, with an image of emptiness being tidied up.
The first sentence sets the tone: "I cannot do better at doing little / than a parson with two livings." A "living" is a church post that comes with an income, so a parson holding two has two incomes and, in the traditional comic picture, not much work to show for them. The speaker treats idleness as a contest and modestly admits defeat. The phrasing is a small paradox, since "do better at doing little" makes laziness sound like an accomplishment. The parson also belongs to the churchyard, so the joke feels local, as if the speaker were comparing himself with the neighbours.
Then the register shifts. "I turn my rat step / over the gravestones" is odd and compressed. A rat is small, low, quick and furtive, a scavenger that lives at the edge of things. Calling his walk a "rat step" shrinks the speaker to that scale and gives him none of a mourner's dignity. "Turn" is worth pausing on too. It might mean pacing back and forth, and it might hint at turning things over, as one turns over stones. The poem never says which. Judging by the imagery, he is a creature nosing around the dead rather than a grieving visitor. The graves are only "gravestones", with no names or dates and no personal loss attached.
He is looking for something, though: "finding no company stirring." "Stirring" suggests that some part of him half-hopes the dead might move, or that anything at all might show signs of life. Nothing does. The line break then delivers a flat correction: "just a table / like an accountant."
This is the poem's cleverest moment. "Table" can be read two ways. Churchyards have table tombs, flat-topped monuments that look like furniture. A table is also an arrangement of figures, the accountant's own tool. The simile joins the two senses, so the grave becomes a ledger and the stone becomes a bookkeeper. The pause after "table" lets the bare object sit there before the comparison arrives.
The last stanza is "brisk and busy / only to manage the void." Grammar leaves it open whether "brisk and busy" describes the table, the accountant, or both, and the blur seems useful. "Only" also works in two directions: the accountant is busy solely in order to manage the void, and the void is the only thing there is to manage. "Manage" is a deliberately bureaucratic verb, and set beside death it is both funny and chilling.
The poem is built in four small stanzas of two, two, three and two lines, with no rhyme and no regular metre. Without those patterns, sound does the shaping. The soft *l* sounds of "little" and "livings" give the opening a lazy drift. The *s* sounds of "step," "stones" and "stirring" make a hush, like footsteps on gravel. By the end the lines have shrunk to "brisk and busy," whose clipped consonants imitate the bustle they describe, and the poem stops on "void," a short, hollow word with nothing after it. The lines get shorter and quicker as the poem moves from lounging to busyness, and the speed feels slightly frantic against the stillness around it.
What makes the poem worth reading is the contrast between its two figures. The parson and the speaker are open about doing little. The accountant, as the poem imagines him, fills every moment with activity that cannot change anything. The poem seems to prefer the honest idler, who at least does not pretend that busyness is a defence against death. It reaches that view through a joke, an animal image and a pun rather than through solemn statement. For a student, it shows how a few lines can change tone, from comedy to unease, mostly through word choice and a well-placed line break. It also shows how a comparison can carry an argument. Calling a gravestone an accountant says more about how people cope with mortality than a paragraph of explanation would.