Edward Thomas is usually thought of as a poet of lanes and weather, so it is striking that "Parting" begins by taking the weather away. In the Past, he says, "Wind blows not there, nor does rain fall", and if they did, "they cannot hurt at all." The first three stanzas picture memory as a country with no climate: "soundless fields and streets" where people drift as shades. The tone is cool and almost philosophical. Then the poem turns personal, and that turn is what it is really about.
The central idea is that parting hurts twice. It hurts first "because it was parting". The second pain is stranger. The "ill" that the parting ended has come back "from the Past again", and it no longer looks like an ill. The poem never says what the trouble was, only that it involved "Sighs, angry word and look and deed". We might expect the speaker to feel relieved, or at least to see the trouble as something that "had been remedied / Had I gone on". He rejects that at once: "not that, oh no!" Instead the old bitterness has faded into "a kind of bliss". Now that it can never be mended, even the quarrel looks precious, and that is why it seems to mock him. Memory has tidied away everything that made the relationship difficult and left only what he has lost.
The poem prepares for this with a general rule: remembered joy and misery "Bring joy to the joyous equally; / Both sadden the sad." Memory simply magnifies the mood of whoever is remembering. The speaker's own case then reads like a sad example of a law he has already stated, which gives the poem its calm, reasoned feel.
The form supports this. There are six quatrains, each rhymed ABBA, so the first and last lines of every stanza frame the two in the middle ("strange / fall / all / range"). Each stanza ends by echoing the sound it began with, which suits a poem about returning to things. The metre is mostly iambic tetrameter, plain and close to speech. Yet the sentences refuse to stop where the stanzas do. "So memory made / Parting to-day a double pain" runs over the stanza break, and so does "angry word and look and deed / Being faded". The thought keeps spilling over, as if the speaker cannot contain it. The last stanza is one long, slightly awkward sentence in which he seems to correct himself mid-thought ("rather a kind of bliss").
The language works largely by negation. The Past is defined by what it lacks: "not", "nor", "no", "naught", "lacks". The "perished self" is broken into "blood and nerve and wit", as if a person were being listed as parts that have gone missing. Against all these plain, short words, "spiritualized" stands out as the longest and most abstract word in the poem. It names what memory does: it removes the body, and with it the roughness and the sting. "Perpetual yesterday" is an unsettling phrase, since yesterday is by nature something that passes, yet here it is fixed for ever. Even the closing "stir or stain" carries the weather imagery forward. Nothing, it suggests, can disturb or mark this preserved past. The final word, "this", is left open, and it is not clear whether it points to the old quarrel as it now lies in memory or to the new pain of the present parting. That ambiguity is a fitting place to stop.
What makes the poem significant is how it handles a familiar comfort, the idea that time and memory soften pain. Thomas shows the other side of it. The softening is itself a loss, because it takes away the faults that made the past real and leaves a perfection that can't be argued with or repaired. He does this without a named person, a setting or a story, so the reader fills in their own parting. The result is a short poem that is quiet on the surface and quite hard on the feelings underneath.