Edward Thomas opens with a question he never answers directly. "What does it mean?" The poem starts mid-argument with itself, and the speaker is "tired, angry, and ill at ease", so out of sorts that "no man, woman, or child alive" could please him. The sweeping list is a little comic, the grumble of someone who knows he is being unreasonable. That self-awareness sets the tone for everything after. He "almost dare[s] to laugh" as he drafts his own epitaph: "Here lies all that no one loved of him / And that loved no one." The neat reversal is bleak, but it is also a joke at his own expense, and the wit suggests he hasn't entirely given up on himself. Then even the joke tires him out. The whim "has wearied."
The poem is written in rhyming couplets, a form that usually sounds tidy and sure of itself, and Thomas makes it sound like talk. Sentences ignore the couplet boundaries and the syntax wanders, so the rhymes arrive almost by surprise. The stranded word "whim" is the clearest example. It doesn't fit the line, so it drops onto a short line of its own to complete the rhyme with "him". The thought seems to run out of room, just as the speaker's amusement runs out of energy.
The longest movement is a single sentence that begins "But, though I am like a river" and does not reach its main clause until "This heart", four lines later. The river is an image of flatness and cold. It is evening, the sun has seemingly "never" lit or warmed it, and "cross breezes cut the surface to a file". A file is a hard, scraping tool, and the metaphor turns water into something rasped and grey. Because the grammar holds back its release, we wait through the gloom and then feel the lift when the heart finally goes.
Even then the release is partial. The heart is only "some fraction of me", a cool, almost arithmetical phrase, as if the speaker were counting what is left. The one openly warm word, "happily", sits at a line-end. The heart "floats through the window" while the man himself, we assume, stays sitting where he was. Only a part of him goes anywhere.
Thomas then separates two kinds of homecoming with two birds. The pewit "returns to wail / For something it has lost", a heart that goes back to grief. The dove "slants unswerving to its home and love". "Slants" makes us see the diagonal of the flight, and "unswerving" answers the cross breezes that were cutting the river. The landscape softens to match, with "misting, dim-lit, quiet vale". The m, l and d sounds slow the line down, and the dusk seems to cushion the arrival.
The title word is held back until the last sentence, and when it comes it is not defined: "Beauty is there." The line is short and plain, and it ends on "there", a place rather than an abstraction. This is the poem's answer to "What does it mean?" Beauty is not explained. It is somewhere the heart can go. The modest "what yet lives in me" matters too. "Yet" suggests survival rather than triumph, and the poem never claims that the tiredness and anger have been cured.
That refusal to overstate is what makes the poem worth reading. It would be easy to write a poem in which nature heals a low mood, but this speaker offers no such guarantee. He lets us see the self-mockery, the exhaustion and the failed joke, and then lets one small, steady thing survive them. For a student reader, the lesson is in how much work the small choices do: the word that dangles off a line, the sentence that withholds its verb, the single "happily". Together they make consolation feel earned and believable.