The title makes a promise that the poem then quietly wrecks. "On the make" is an idiom for someone hungrily pursuing something, whether romance, advancement or advantage. It suggests a hunter. Yet the speaker who goes "out in society" ends up as something far humbler than a predator: "a crow's sandwich / among the ladies." In four short lines, the person who set out to get what he wants becomes the thing that gets eaten. That reversal is the poem's central idea. Social ambition, the poem suggests, turns a person into a product, and the speaker knows it.
The line breaks do most of the work. Read the first couplet on its own and it is a complete, slightly chilling statement: "out in society / I make myself." Everyone who has ever dressed up, rehearsed small talk or put on a manner for a party will recognise that. The self is something manufactured for public use. Only when the second couplet arrives does "make" turn literal and comic. The verb now means both "fashion myself into" and "prepare," as one makes a sandwich. The grammar allows two pictures at once: the speaker as cook, assembling something to offer, and the speaker as the ingredients, assembled. The title's "make" adds a third echo, so one small word runs through the whole poem and keeps changing its meaning.
Then there is that odd phrase, "a crow's sandwich." The poem never explains it, which is what makes it interesting. "Crow" carries several meanings, and the poem lets them all hover. To "eat crow" means to swallow humiliation, so the speaker may be serving himself a little public embarrassment. Crows are also black-feathered scavengers, and judging by the setting, the image may nod to dark formal clothes and to the way a guest picks at what is on offer. To "crow" is also to boast, which sits oddly against the self-deprecation elsewhere. The possessive matters too. A crow's sandwich is either food for a crow or something a crow would make, and the poem doesn't say whether the crow is the speaker or the ladies. "Sandwich" also suggests being squeezed in the middle, which fits "among the ladies": a filling pressed between slices of polite company.
The vocabulary is built in layers. "Society" and "ladies" are formal, old-fashioned, drawing-room words, and they frame the poem at its start and finish. Between them sits the blunt, animal, lunchbox image. Polite language wraps a squawking, scavenging centre, much like the social occasion itself. "Society" is also a long Latinate word, and it is deflated almost at once by the short, plain "sandwich."
Formally, the poem is two unrhymed couplets with lines of roughly four to six syllables, so it moves in small, quick steps. There are no capitals and no punctuation, which gives it an offhand, murmured tone, like a thought muttered at the edge of a party. Without commas or full stops, the reader has to decide where the breaks in sense fall, and the line endings make those decisions. The sound is quietly patterned as well. Soft s sounds slide through "society," "myself," "crow's," "sandwich" and "ladies," a hiss that could be gossip or whispering. Against this, "crow's" is the only word with a harsh, caw-like opening, and it lodges in the middle of the poem like an intruder.
What makes the poem worth studying is how much it does with so little. It is a joke, but a double-edged one. It mocks the social performance and the speaker's own part in it, and it never says whether the performance succeeds. Is he a clever opportunist or just something for others to pick at? The poem refuses to say, and that open question is where the humour turns slightly uncomfortable. For a reader learning how poems work, it shows that a line break can split a phrase into two meanings, and that one strange, concrete image can say more about self-presentation than a page of explanation.