Firstly, the poet structured the poem with very short stanza which presents a clear view and a very urging tone. With the stanza only a few lines long the readers are a given a view that the poets view and expression are very clear and on the point rather than beating around the bushes. This way the readers sense how the poet himself must be feeling when he wrote the poem. Now when the readers are reading the starting of the poem they are able to get a feeling that this person who was personified was a person who was a workaholic as the environment had an influence on him. In the first two lines the is something which is contradicting that it is said that he wakes up every morning with an old sickness in his head. In this the contradicting fact is that the sickness that is the tiredness and the exhaustion of the previous day’s work.
Then in the second stanza it is showed that the protagonist is a in such a hurry this can be perceived form the incident that he was sawing with the newspaper and after reading the newspaper threw or throttled it inside the rubbish bin. Then the instance is that he was racing towards the high raised building very fast where he works everyday over there.
In the third stanza it is said that he used to toil hard day and night for his work but in the end the he was back to square one. He did not realise that he was actually trading his time that is working for his office and the never returned the favour to him. The whole day of working has actually abandoned him with no energy that he had to literally crawl to his home. The essential idea here is that people in this world are actually wasting their time by working and toiling day and night without sleep, the end result is that the person is left out without any energy that he has to literally crawl to his home. The poet is not speaking of only personified character he is actually meaning everybody in this world. Yes it is actually possible to generalise his life from this.
In the fourth stanza it is said that the protagonist’s steps actually got slower and slower that he is losing more and more energy. Then at home he was reckoning his costs and whenever he used see a football match in the television he was never very enthusiastic about is he would just yawn and say that we lost. The purpose of starting the stanza with a ‘And’ was that the poet has seen him as a person who is very bleak in nature which made him to start with an ‘And’. In the fifth stanza it is told that he did not refrain himself that is he did not abstain from an impulse to say or do something. He was actually frightened by the fact that how he would go for work the next day. There were no messages more than self-mocking that is he was joking at himself. Every day he used to only feel the smell of defeat because of his work he is only use to smelling defeat rather than the sweet smell of victory.
In the sixth stanza now that he reached home after a hard day of working he is so tired that he think of nothing else than sleeping. So he would retire for the night he will creep in between the two sheets of his bed tired and exhausted after his whole day after the whole day of working. Then he will fall into the battle field of the sleep. In the seventh stanza it is written that in his dreams he was like a hero that is after he falls asleep he will wake up in the world of dream, only in that his unconscious mind portrayed himself as a hero of far lands. He portrayed himself as though he was a person from royal blue blood and he romances boldly. He is made of a lion’s heart that he was daring enough to do anything he wants. He also thought that he was far more superior to all other people on the world.
In the eighth and the last stanza it is said that after waking is when the protagonist find himself in the same old rugged clothes and the place he went sleep the day before. Then in the bathroom he would find that old and the same tired face again. Then the line ‘reciting the same cold mantra’ means that he would repeat the same things he did the previous day.
Conclusion
To summarise, Kevin Ireland wrote the poem in small stanza to get his ideas and to express his points clearly to the readers. He also included conflicts between the first two lines of every two stanza. The way he used his language made the readers to indulge themselves into the situations the poet was writing about. The tone through the poem was also not constant as we can see that in the first three stanza the tone was rather more rushing and the next three stanzas were very slow or rather very sloppy to hear. This poem tells us about the life of the adult and how stressful their lives are. It also tells us about the aftermath of the day of a working adult. The poem also showcases the dream of an adult since all dream are not fulfilled they have to see their same old faces every day in the bathroom mirror.