A man walks through a churchyard with nothing to do, and he admits it with a wry sort of pride. He compares his idleness to a parson who holds two livings, someone paid for two posts and likely doing little in either. The speaker claims he can't beat that kind of professional loafing.
As he picks his way over the gravestones, his "rat step" makes him sound small, furtive, a little scurrying creature. He finds no company among the dead, nobody stirring. The only thing that seems to be working is a table, which the poem likens to an accountant, brisk and busy, "only to manage the void." That image is darkly funny: even emptiness gets bookkeeping.
The mood is dry, quiet and faintly mocking. Beneath the humor, the poem suggests a sense of loneliness and the pointlessness of busyness when death is all around.