Nine lines, over almost before they begin: two men on a road, a couple stepping out of a wood, and a girl running off. Edward Thomas gives no backstory and no commentary, only a few seconds of looking and a few lines of overheard talk. The poem works because the men's words reveal as much about them as about the lovers, and about what a wood can mean.
The first line reverses our expectations. "The two men in the road were taken aback." We might expect the lovers to be the ones caught out, yet it is the onlookers who flinch. The couple emerge "shading their eyes from the sun", blinking out of the wood's shade, and what the men see is startlingly sharp: "never was white so white, or black so black, / As her cheeks and hair." The doubled phrasing sounds like a ballad or fairy tale, but it also captures a physical moment, the jolt of strong contrast when your eyes meet bright light. The woman is reduced to two colours, a picture glimpsed rather than a person known. The lovers have no names, while the watchers, George and Jack, do. The poem stays on the roadside with the men, and we see the lovers only through them.
The dialogue is where the comedy lies. George's remark, "There are more things than one / A man might turn into a wood for," is a wink disguised as an understatement. Jack's whispered reply, "He has not got a gun," reads like a piece of detective work. Judging by the exchange, the men have run through the reasons a man might enter a wood, and the missing gun eliminates the innocent ones. The whisper is telling too. The lovers have already walked out into the open, yet the men lower their voices, as if they were the trespassers. Jack's verdict, "It's a bit too much of a good thing, I say," could be scandalised, envious or simply amused. The poem never decides, and that is part of its charm.
The sound patterns keep the scene quick and slightly mocking. The rhyme runs ababab, then breaks into cbc, so nine lines rest on just three sounds. "Aback," "black" and "Jack" chime in the odd-numbered lines. "Sun," "one," "gun" and "run" answer them, and between them they sketch the whole episode: the light that dazzles, the weapon that isn't there, the flight that ends the scene. Then "say" in line seven waits until the final word, "may," for its partner. That delayed rhyme lands like a small click at the end.
The rhythm is loose and close to speech. The lines are long enough to spill over, and line two tumbles forward on its unstressed syllables, as if the couple were walking briskly out into the light. Against that, "She ran." is the shortest sentence in the poem, with dashes on either side. It is the first and only thing the woman does, and the form makes it sudden. We never learn why she runs, whether from shyness, play or embarrassment, and the poem is better for leaving it open.
The closing line, "What a thing it is, this picking may," is spoken by no one in particular, so it drifts between the men and the poem itself. "May" is hawthorn blossom, and "picking may" sounds like an innocent country pastime. I suspect it is a knowing phrase for the very thing the men have just guessed at, though the text only hints at this. The word also carries the sense of possibility, and the spring season. A real event shrinks into a shake of the head, half a proverb and half a smirk.
The poem is slight, but its significance lies in what it understands about watching. Other people's happiness can make us feel awkward, nosy, wistful and tender all at once, and the men feel every one of those without admitting to any. In a few lines the poem sets a flash of vivid colour beside ordinary talk, and it never tells us what to think.