A marriage ends its dialogue in about thirty seconds here, and almost no one says what they mean. "Accusation" is a short scene with a quick, brutal reversal. A husband complains that his wife never knows her own mind, then drives away. She, left alone, tells the empty room what he never bothered to ask: she knows exactly what she wants, and it is him.
The title is the first clever move, because we expect the accusation to come from the husband. He opens the poem with a charge: "You don't know WHAT you want." His list of her supposed whims (a yacht, sables, a Pekinese) reads like a receipt, and the capitalised WHAT shows how loudly he delivers it. But the real accusation arrives in the final stanza, and it is aimed at him. The "many substitutes" he has handed her were never answers to her desire; they were ways of avoiding it. His gifts are a kind of payment for absence, and the poem suggests that the more he is away, the more he buys.
The poet builds him almost entirely from gestures. We never hear his tone described, only what he does: he is "impatient to be gone," he glances at his watch, he has "a cold cigar" between his lips. That adjective carries a lot. A cigar is a conventional symbol of wealth and bluster, but "cold" suggests something unlit and unenjoyed, and it also hints at the temperature of the man himself. His farewell, "Well, 'bye my dear," is the emptiest possible endearment, the "dear" tacked on like a habit. Even his exit is rushed, "off he dashes in his car," with its busy verb and its machine standing in for any warmth. Notice, too, that the things he lists are all objects and animals to be acquired, which is precisely how he seems to think of solving a person.
The wife, by contrast, gets only a single line of description, and it is the most telling in the poem: "Her smile was not a merry one." Nothing is said of tears or anger. The restraint is part of the effect. She speaks only after he has gone, so her answer is a private one, and the poem hints at a marriage in which being heard is not on offer. Her reply opens with a small, firm "Oh, yes I do!", a direct rebuttal of his opening line, now stripped of capital letters and shouting.
The form supports all of this. The poem moves in regular four-line stanzas with an alternating rhyme, and the lines are mostly built on a steady, brisk beat that suits the husband's hurry. The rhymes are plain and almost nursery-simple, which makes the final one land with real force: "do" and "you". The poem has been circling a missing word, and when it arrives it is the simplest one possible. Her words also run in a neat reversal of his: he lists many things, she names one. The long catalogue of "yacht," "sables," "Pekinese" collapses into a single pronoun, and the three-syllable luxuries give way to a one-syllable truth.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so little space. It never lectures about loneliness or materialism; it simply shows a man who mistakes spending for caring and a woman who has stopped expecting to be understood. The humour is dry and the sadness is quiet, and the two sit together uncomfortably, which is the point. The poem also leaves a question open: will she ever say this to his face? Because it ends on her words rather than on any reply, we are left to feel how rarely, in the world of the poem, such words are said to the person who needs to hear them.