A passing remark about hay becomes, in Edward Thomas's hands, a measure of a whole life. The speaker stands at a stile on a July evening, looking over fields that have turned "perfect green again" after what he calls "a second Spring." A "wandering man" says that "the lattermath / Will be a fine one." Lattermath is the second crop of grass that grows after the first mowing, a close relative of the word "aftermath," which once meant the same thing. Twenty years later, the speaker recalls the stranger's words on another July evening and asks what kind of lattermath awaits him, now that he is grey. The poem's central idea is that a casual comment about the land can come to read like a prophecy, and that the person who heard it must in the end answer for it.
The poem is a sonnet, but a quietly irregular one. The first eight lines rhyme ABAB CDCD, and the turn comes at line nine, where the past gives way to the present with "now I recall." The last six lines rhyme EFEF and then close on a loose couplet, "wondering" and "Spring." That rhyme is imperfect, which suits a poem that ends without an answer. The metre is a flexible iambic pentameter that keeps the rhythm of speech: "At a stile I stood, looking along a path" has the slow, deliberate pace of someone standing still and taking in a view. Some of the phrasing is slightly old-fashioned, with "Albeit" and the inversion "Flushed with desire I was." This gives the speaker a faintly formal, remembering voice.
The rhymes also carry meaning. "Path" is paired with "lattermath," so the literal track across the fields is tied to the future the stranger names. The stranger's sentence spills across a line break, and the key word lands at the line's end, where the rhyme gives it extra weight.
The first half is full of appetite. The speaker "stood at rest," yet is "Flushed with desire," and the contrast between his still body and his restless feeling is what the scene turns on. Then comes the boldest move: "The earth outspread, / Like meadows of the future, I possessed." The simile runs backwards. We expect the future to be compared to a landscape, but here the real meadows are compared to the future, and the young man feels he owns both just by looking. Delaying the verb "possessed" to the end of the line makes the claim sound like a confident boast.
In the sestet that confidence is tested. The sentence is long, and its main verb "recall" does not arrive until line twelve, after the clauses about "the interval / Of a score years" and the fields "Never to be recrossed." The syntax makes us wait through the gap of time, just as the speaker has. The poem never says why the fields cannot be recrossed, and that silence is part of its mood. The stranger's words are called "an unaccomplished prophecy," a strange phrase, since a prophecy is not usually something you can leave unfinished. It suggests that the promise of a fine second growth has not yet been met, or that the speaker cannot tell whether it has.
The final line turns the farmer's phrase on the speaker himself. "This hoar Spring" echoes the "second Spring" of line three, but "hoar" means white or frosted with age. The season of renewal now wears the colour of winter, and the speaker's own later life has become a second spring that looks frosty. The poem ends on a question mark rather than a reassurance: "What of the lattermath to this hoar Spring?"
What makes the poem memorable is how much it asks of one word. "Lattermath" begins as a plain term from the hayfield and ends as a name for whatever is left to a person after youth has been spent. The stranger, nameless and wandering, never knows he has said anything important. The poem also does not tell us whether the late growth turned out fine. It leaves us beside the speaker, looking at an evening much like the first and not sure what the grass will yield. That mix of plain speech, tight form and honest uncertainty is what lifts a small moment at a stile into something that stays with the reader.