Six years old and already overwhelmed: that is the child who speaks every line of Edward Thomas's poem. Each stanza opens with quotation marks, so the whole poem is his voice, a stream of wondering aloud. It starts with something small and close, an old white horse rolling in the orchard, "stained with moss / And with earth". It ends with a boy too daunted by the size of the world to sleep. The central idea is the dizzy discovery that knowledge has no edge. The more the child knows, the more clearly he sees what he doesn't.
The form suits this. Each stanza is six lines of rhyming couplets, with a chiming, nursery-rhyme bounce. Thomas keeps the rhythm loose and talkative, close to the way a child chatters, with four beats to most lines and no stiffness. Some of the rhymes are only near-rhymes, such as "moss" and "horse", or "across" and "Horse". That slight unevenness feels more like real speech than polished verse. The refrain does the most work. "The swift, the swallow, the hawk, and the hern" is a list of birds, a small inventory of things the boy is proud to know. It is followed at once by the reminder "There are two million things for me to learn." The refrain tallies up what he has and what he lacks in the same breath.
Its small changes mark the child's progress. In the first stanza he says only "the swallow, the hawk, and the hern". By the second, the swift has joined the list, as if he has learned something new between stanzas. The number shifts too. "Two million" is a child's idea of enormous, a figure grabbed because it sounds biggest. In the last line it loosens into "millions of things", and the exact count dissolves, as though he can no longer keep track. The old-fashioned word "hern" for heron adds a rural, well-worn flavour, as if the boy has picked up the birds' names from the countryside around him.
The poem's imagery gathers around white horses, and they widen outward like ripples. The first is real and physical, an animal rolling in the dirt. The child sees himself in it, asking "Where is his father and where is his mother... Has he a brother?" and so his curiosity is tied to feeling. The second horse belongs to a nursery rhyme, carrying a lady "with rings and bells to Banbury Cross". The boy treats the rhyme with comic seriousness: "Was there no other lady in England beside / That a nursery rhyme could take for a ride?" He is questioning inherited wisdom. The third is the Westbury White Horse, the chalk figure on the hillside of "Salisbury Plain's green wall", and he imagines a man riding it, wondering whether he was "bound for Westbury, or had he a fall?" So the horses move from the orchard to a song to the landscape and its history, and each is a different kind of knowing. When the boy says "Out of all the white horses I know three", he is counting exactly the three we have met.
The last stanza turns the wonder into something nearer anxiety. "There is so much to learn, for men" shows that he already thinks of himself as a future man with a duty to understand. "I dare not go to bed again" is funny, because it is exactly what a six-year-old would say. It is also touching. Sleep seems like lost time to him, a gap in the great work of finding out. Judging by the poem's tone, Thomas neither mocks nor corrects him. He lets the child's logic stand, and the adult reader is left to hear what the boy cannot yet say, that no one ever finishes learning.
The poem is significant for its trust in simple means. A few horses, a handful of birds and a repeated couplet carry a real idea, and nothing is explained from above. The boy's questions go unanswered, and that is the point. The poem finds beauty in how much there is still to ask.