A ration is a portion handed out by someone else, usually in lean times, and the title promises that kind of grim bookkeeping. Yet the poem has almost no food in it. What the speaker is given is "dinner of air / for an old man." In fifteen words we get a whole small story: a meal, an appetite, and a body that pays for it.
The poem is built from two couplets, and the shift between them matters. The first reads like a label or a menu entry. There is no "a" before "dinner," so it sounds telegraphic, like a line on a ration card, and "an old man" is a category rather than a person. Then the second couplet drops into the first person: "I eat and eat." The old man turns out to be the speaker, who has been describing himself from the outside before stepping into his own body. The effect is like a joke told about someone else that ends with the teller admitting it was about him.
The sound of the poem is as spare as its subject. The lines are short, with two or three strong beats each, and there are no capitals or full stops in the body of the poem, only the capitalised title. Nothing signals a halt, so the lines read like breaths, which suits a poem about air. The one rhyme is "dinner" and "thinner," placed at the start of the first line and the end of the last. The two words differ by a single sound, and that small change acts out the poem's logic. Dinner leads directly to thinning, as if the second word were the first one worn down. The repetition in "I eat and eat" works differently. The extra "and" stretches the action, the way a meal drags on when nothing on the plate ever gets finished. Hunger here shows up as endlessness rather than complaint.
Two words work together without ever appearing side by side. "Air" opens the poem and "thinner" closes it, and between them they suggest "thin air," a phrase the text never writes. We say people vanish into thin air, and that is the poem's quiet menace. The old man is becoming what he eats and slowly moving toward the condition of his food. The humour darkens as a result, because the diet is not just too small but transformative. The comparative "thinner" also matters. It describes a process rather than a result, and it implies that tomorrow's dinner will be the same and the thinning will go on.
The poem leaves other readings open, and it is better for it. "Come home" suggests the speaker has been somewhere. The poem names no place, but judging by the imagery, a walk outdoors is a fair guess, with the meal taken in wind and weather. On that reading the "eating" is a hungry taking-in of the world, and air is the one thing that is never rationed. The title then becomes ironic, since the speaker has an unlimited supply of the one thing that doesn't fill him. "Thinner" could even mean lighter and less burdened, not only diminished. The poem doesn't choose between loss and lightness.
What makes it worth reading is its tone. There is no "I am hungry" and no "I am dying," and the old man doesn't ask for pity. He reports his dinner and his weight in the same level voice, and the humour is deadpan. Old age appears as a gradual subtraction, handled with a dry wit that holds the sadness down without denying it.
It is also a good example of how much a poem can ask of its reader. Almost nothing is explained: who rations the food, why there is only air, where the speaker goes. We fill those gaps ourselves, and each answer, whether poverty, ageing or a more spiritual kind of fasting, changes how we hear the last word. A poem this short can hold that many meanings because every word is doing work, and "thinner" does the most. It ends the poem on an unfinished measure, with the old man still going out to eat.