Clough begins by borrowing a sentence and grumbling about it. The words "doth not yet appear" come from the First Epistle of John, which says that what believers will become has not yet been revealed. The poet's reaction is almost a groan: "Ah! did he tell what we are here!" The title adds Paul's image of seeing "through a glass, darkly". Both texts promise clearer sight later, and the poem is about how to live in the dimness before that.
The second stanza shrinks human beings to almost nothing. We are given "a mind for thoughts to pass into, / A heart for loves to travel through", as if mind and heart were railway stations, places where things stop briefly on their way elsewhere. The "five senses" can only "detect things near", a modest, faintly insulting job description. Then comes the blunt question, "Is this the whole that we are here?" The third stanza goes further, with a run of paradoxes: "Rules baffle instincts--instinct rules, / Wise men are bad--and good are fools." The lines are short and clipped, and the dashes make them feel like a mind going round in circles. Everything cancels out, and the stanza ends in a kind of paralysis: "We cannot go, why are we here?"
The form helps. Nearly every stanza is a pair of rhymed couplets in short, four-beat lines, and the same rhyme returns again and again on "appear" and "here". That refrain traps the poem. Whatever the speaker tries, the stanza closes on the same word. Its grammar keeps shifting, though. At first it is an exclamation, then a plain question ("Is this the whole…"), then a despairing one ("why are we here?"). The fourth stanza sets out the temptation to quit thinking: take "some arbitrary judgement" and "wilfully pronounce it clear". The word "wilfully" shows what Clough thinks of that, since it means forcing certainty rather than finding it. The fifth stanza offers the harder option, "to pace the sad confusion through". "Pace" suggests walking up and down in a small room. The plain phrase "will it do" sounds like someone honestly wondering whether this is allowed.
The poem turns at "Ah yet, when all is thought and said." Here the refrain stops. Stanzas six and seven do not end on "here", and the word slips inside a line, in "What here is faithfully begun". The other change is the repeated "still": the heart "still overrules the head", "Still what we hope we must believe", "Must still believe, for still we hope". The word suggests stubbornness as much as constancy. Clough does not claim that hope is proof. He admits the heart wins against the head, but he treats that as a fact about human beings to be accepted, not a defeat. The idea that follows is simple and humane: what is "begun" here, "faithfully", will be "completed, not undone."
The last stanza completes the circle. For the first time someone is addressed, "My child", and the pronoun "we" becomes "together", which appears twice. The opening line said it "doth not yet appear"; the closing one says "Some true result will yet appear". The same small word "yet" has moved from a delay to a promise. The final line, "Of what we are, together, here", no longer asks a question. It still has no certainty, but it has company. The address to a child could be literal or just tender, and the poem does not say. Either way, the comfort it offers is shared looking, not doctrine.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It gives the doubter's complaints a full hearing, including the sense of being a mere thoroughfare, the muddle of moral life, and the pull of easy answers. Then it answers them with a hope that knows it is only hope. Clough neither fakes clarity nor sinks into despair. He keeps looking through the dark glass, and he does not do it alone.