"Der Leiermann" means loneliness as repeated effort after social meaning has failed. The old man is placed beyond the village at 0:28, then reduced through cold physical facts: stiff fingers at 0:40, bare feet on ice at 0:53, and an empty plate at 1:07. The meaning is not that poverty becomes noble. It is that the song makes the listener stay with a gesture that receives almost nothing back.

The cruel turn is that the instrument keeps going after recognition has failed. At 1:22 and 1:45, no one wants to hear him, no one looks at him, and even the surrounding dogs answer more forcefully than the human community. By 2:12 and 2:27, letting things go as they will becomes another kind of endurance. The final question at 3:20 does not redeem the scene. It asks whether one abandoned singer can recognize another and walk beside the same unprofitable turning.