Two men walking a country road are startled by the sudden appearance of a pair of lovers. The woman’s cheeks are strikingly pale, her hair strikingly dark — an almost mythic contrast in the sunlight. George comments that there are all sorts of reasons a man might slip into a wood, and Jack, more practical, notes that the other fellow isn’t even carrying a gun. Their banter is earthy, half-amused, half-embarrassed, like two ordinary men caught off guard by something too intense for the roadside. The lovers turn away down another path, and the woman runs — a flash of energy and joy.
What really lands, though, is the quiet afterthought that closes the scene: “What a thing it is, this picking may.” It’s as if the speaker, having watched the whole little drama, is suddenly struck by the sheer strangeness of a spring ritual — gathering hawthorn blossom, courting, all of it. The mood is gently wondering, a mix of dry humour and unexpected tenderness. You feel the speaker standing apart, but also drawn in, momentarily shaken out of his own thoughts by beauty and its oddness.