A change of mind about dinner is about as small as an event can get, yet this poem makes it feel like a verdict on two people. A man decides, at some point, that he wants red meat. A woman eats the vegetables that were meant for him, and the poem tells us she does it "in vain." Nothing dramatic happens, and nobody argues. The central idea is that in some relationships one person's whims set the terms while the other quietly absorbs the consequences, and that this can be seen in the smallest domestic choices.
The two lines above the poem proper are worth pausing on. "sage" is a kitchen herb, so it fits the dinner table. It is also a word for a wise person, and that sets up an irony. Nobody at this table seems to be acting wisely, unless the sage is the woman, whose good sense, in the form of vegetables, goes unrewarded. Then there is «unhealthy», set in guillemets, which makes it read like a label, a quotation or a verdict. The poem never says what is unhealthy. It could be the red meat. It could also be the arrangement of the evening, in which one person wants and the other makes do. That open question is the poem's real subject, and the text itself doesn't settle it.
The line breaks do much of the work. "he" sits alone on a line, which gives the grammatical subject a whole line of space, like a name on a door. "while" is isolated in the same way, and it works as a hinge. The word means "at the same time," and it also suggests contrast, so the two actions happen in parallel but are set against each other. Placed on its own line, it creates a small pause, like the gap across a dinner table. The woman gets no such treatment. "she" is tucked inside the last line, in the middle of her own sentence, with an action that responds to his. The layout is lopsided in the same way the scene is.
The sound of the poem is deadpan. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, so it reads like a note jotted down or a message sent in a hurry. That flatness suits the subject, because the poem never tells us how to feel and leaves the reader to supply the judgment. The second line is built from heavy, practical sounds: "decided," "wanted," "dinner," with their hard d and t. "Red meat" lands as two stressed syllables in a row. The sentence makes his wanting sound casual and final, with two verbs, "decided" and "wanted," stacked on top of each other. Nothing in the line suggests that anyone else was consulted.
The final line is softer and sadder. "She ate his vegetables in vain" is full of long, open sounds. The "ay" of "ate" comes back in "vain," so the line ends with a faint echo of itself, an almost-rhyme with nothing else to answer it. The v of "vegetables" and "vain" links the ordinary object to the sense of failure. The possessive matters too. They are *his* vegetables, which means she is finishing what was planned for him. That could be generosity, or thrift, or duty, or a protest, and the poem doesn't say.
"In vain" is the most carefully chosen phrase, and it is deliberately incomplete. Futile in what way? Perhaps she hoped her eating them would shame him, or persuade him, or make up for him. Perhaps the vegetables were supposed to improve his health, and her eating them achieves nothing for the person they were meant for. The poem withholds her motive, and that withholding keeps the line from becoming a simple complaint.
What makes the poem worth reading is its economy. In four short lines of text, with only two small framing words above them, it gives us a whole dynamic: a person who chooses, a person who adjusts, and a quiet sense that the adjusting changes nothing. It is funny in the way understatement can be funny, since the picture of someone solemnly eating another person's salad is faintly absurd. It is also sad, because the absurdity is the sign of a lopsided exchange. The poem doesn't accuse anyone or explain itself, and the reader is left sitting at the table with the question of what, exactly, is "unhealthy."