On Commissary Goldies Brains - Analysis

A prayer that turns into an insult

This tiny poem pretends to be a humble address to God, then uses that posture to sharpen a very human joke: if God is beyond questioning, then even obvious mistakes must be explained away as divine choice. It opens with the pious-sounding Lord and the firm claim that no one should account for God or dispute Thy pleasure. But that reverence is immediately weaponized against its real target: Commissary Goldie, whose Brains (the title tells us what the treasure is) are treated as laughably inadequate.

The skull as a locked vault

The central image is brutally clear: within so thick a wall suggests a skull, and the mind inside it is mocked as so poor a treasure. Burns sets up an almost architectural mismatch—heavy fortification, meager contents—so that Goldie’s intellect seems not merely small but comically overprotected. The word Enclose makes the head into a container designed for something valuable; the punchline is that it contains almost nothing worth guarding.

Reverence versus common sense

The poem’s tension is between religious submission and ordinary judgment. The speaker claims no one dares call God to account, yet the very next move is an implied complaint: Else, why would God arrange a world in which a person can have such a strong wall around such a weak mind? That contradiction is the engine of the satire. The speaker outwardly refuses to question God, but the question arrives anyway—just displaced onto Goldie’s head as evidence of an inexplicable divine decision.

What the joke suggests about power

Calling the man Commissary hints that Goldie holds an official role, which makes the insult bite harder: the problem is not only a foolish person, but a foolish person with authority. In that light, the poem’s mock-theology becomes a social complaint. If someone so empty-headed can be so well enclose[d]—protected, placed, and enduring—then perhaps the real mystery is not God’s justice but the world’s willingness to mistake thick walls for real value.