A drunk man, a small bird and a lock: the poem packs a whole parable into eight lines and a single sentence. A drunkard, startled by a wren, shows the speaker a lock and then, "like a thing / of great value," a pin. The title supplies the word the poem withholds. "Pick" never appears in the text, but once we have it, the pin becomes a lockpick, the tool that opens what is shut. The central idea is a quiet reversal of values. The figure who stands by "his life of prophesy" has no grand revelation to offer. What he treasures is a tiny instrument of access, and the poem lets us wonder whether that is a poor prophecy or a very honest one.
The construction does most of the work. The poem is written in four couplets, with no punctuation and no capital letters, so it moves as one suspended breath. The grammar holds back its payoff. "The drunkard" ends the first couplet, but we wait until line five for his verb, "shows." In between, the line breaks keep opening double meanings. "Standing by" can mean standing nearby, like a bystander, or standing by something, as one stands by a belief. A man who stands by his "life of prophesy" might be loyal to it or merely loitering beside it. The spelling is worth noticing too. "Prophesy" is the verb form, and "prophecy" the noun, so the phrase quietly makes prophecy something he does, an ongoing activity, rather than a body of pronouncements he owns.
The lines are very short, running from two to six syllables, and they shrink toward the end. The last three steps are "and like a thing," then "of great value," then "a pin." The first of these is almost empty, since "a thing" is as vague as a noun can be. The second raises the stakes with a phrase fit for a jewel or a relic. The third drops us onto the smallest, cheapest object imaginable. The line break after "value" acts like a trapdoor, and the bathos is gentle rather than mocking, because the drunkard's reverence is sincere. The simile is also careful. The pin is shown "like" a thing of great value, so the poem does not say it is one, only that he handles it that way, and the reader has to decide whether he is foolish or right.
Sound ties the small things together. There is no rhyme, but the poem begins its first couplet with "a wren" and ends with "a pin," two one-syllable objects with the same shape and the same closing *n*. The bird and the pin bracket the poem as twin images of smallness. The *p* sounds of "prophesy" and "pin" echo the title's "Pick," so the poem's three key words are bound together by sound before we think about them as ideas. Meanwhile "life," "lock," "like" and "value" carry a soft thread of *l* through the middle, which makes the lines feel smoother as they approach the hard click of "lock."
The wren deserves attention, since it is the only living creature here and the thing that sets the scene in motion. Reading birds for omens is an old human habit, and a prophet startled by one fits that tradition. Here, though, the bird is just a bird, and nothing in the poem tells us what it means. Its job may be to remind us of the scale of the poem's world: a wren, a pin, a lock, small things noticed closely.
The poem is also a lock of its own. It gives us a shut surface, an odd man, and one humble tool, and we must work the tumblers ourselves. We never learn what the lock guards, or whether the drunkard can open it. The suggestion is that a prophet's real gift may be the pin, the means of getting in, rather than any vision of what lies beyond. That is why so slight a poem stays in the mind. It trusts a single, slightly absurd image to carry a thought about wisdom, humility and where value is found, and then it stops, leaving the reader holding the pin.