Edward Thomas gives us a very small event: a walker in stormy woods on New Year's morning passes an old man raking leaves, and they exchange greetings. Nothing is resolved and nobody learns a lesson. What the poem does is slow down the act of seeing, and the meeting turns out to be stranger than it first looks.
The opening claim, "He was the one man I met up in the woods," sounds like the start of an anecdote told over a fence. Then the speaker admits he "could not tell how much / Of the strange tripod was a man." The old man is first a shape, a structure of two legs and a rake holding up a horizontal body. Thomas's comparison is delightfully lopsided: the man is "far less like a man than / His wheel-barrow in profile was like a pig." The sentence turns back on itself as it tries to measure how unlike a man this figure is, and it ends with a barrow becoming a pig. The speaker's mind, confronted with something it can't identify, reaches for whatever comes.
What it reaches for next is childhood. Once he realises he is looking at "an old man bent," he thinks of boys' games, "_High-Cockalorum_, / _Fly-the-garter_, and _Leap-frog_." Those italicised names are a pleasure to say, and they carry a faint irony. The posture of a child at play is the posture of an old man at work, and the same bent back means something quite different at the two ends of a life. The poem doesn't spell this out. It lets the pictures sit side by side.
The animal imagery continues when the man responds to the footsteps: "His head rolled under his cape like a tortoise's." A tortoise suggests age, slowness and a habit of withdrawing from weather and strangers. Yet the next lines bring a surprising courtesy. He takes "an unlit pipe out of his mouth / Politely ere I wished him 'A Happy New Year.'" The old-fashioned "ere" fits the formality of the gesture, and the detail of the unlit pipe is the kind of small, exact observation that makes the scene believable. By now the creature in the leaves is fully a person, with manners.
The form supports this slow, conversational feel. The poem is unrhymed and loosely iambic, close to blank verse, but it keeps slipping out of regular pentameter into the rhythm of talk. Sentences run across line endings, and a line can finish on a weak word like "than." Twice a single word spills onto its own indented line, "sight" and "Muttered." Each time the poem seems to hesitate, as if the speaker were catching up with what he saw, and that suits the theme of delayed recognition. Even the awkward phrase "with his head cast upward sideways" keeps a precise physical truth ahead of any neat poetic effect.
The old man's answer is the poem's puzzle: "Happy New Year, and may it come fastish, too." The speaker hears it only "through the trees' roar," so the words are partly lost in the storm, and the casual "fastish" has a countryman's bluntness. Why should anyone want a year to come quickly? Judging by the text, the old man may simply be impatient for better weather, or he may mean something wryer about time, work and age. Thomas gives no explanation. The sentence is left as it was said, and the reader has to live with the uncertainty.
The last line sharpens the contrast between the two men: "While I strode by and he turned to raking leaves." The speaker moves briskly on, and the old man goes back to a task that has no end, since leaves keep falling. The wish for the year to hurry along sits oddly beside that patient routine. The title promises a beginning, but the scene ends on a repeated, unremarkable job.
The poem is worth reading because it treats an ordinary encounter with honesty, humour and respect. It admits the speaker's first reaction, which is to see the old man as a thing, and then shows that reaction being corrected by a few polite words. The poem doesn't claim to understand the stranger. It leaves him intact, a little mysterious, and still working in the wind.