Edward Thomas places a tiny chapel at the centre of an enormous argument. Tucked into a fold of the mountain with a few old gravestones, it is cut off "from sound and view / Of life", and the first thing the poem registers is a loss: "the loss of the brook's voice / Falls like a shadow." Silence is given weight and darkness, so that a missing sound becomes something you can almost see. What is left is "the eternal noise" of wind in the grass. Even the vocabulary is a step down. The brook had a "voice", but the wind only makes "noise".
Then the grass starts to talk. The wind's speech, the only quoted voice in the poem, is a bleak little sermon. Man's birth is "but a moment", and in another he "lies in earth / For ever", while the wind remains "the same / Now... even as I was / Before he came." Its last line, "Till there is nothing I shall be", is strangely open. The wind seems to promise that it will last until nothing is left to be anything at all. The sound itself is hostile, grass "more shrill / Than aught as human as a sword". A sword is the sharpest thing people make, and the wind outdoes it.
The poem could stop there, but it turns on "Yet". The sun shines "so cheerfully" that the place "almost seems peopled", and Thomas builds this warmth from plain, domestic words: "cottage chimney, cottage hearth", "homeliness", a "garden of wild flowers". The syntax wobbles slightly, as if he is working out the claim as he goes. The chapel is no bigger than a cottage and "less / Than any other empty home / In homeliness", which means it is no less homely than any empty house. The gravestones are "warm / In sunshine hours", so that death feels almost companionable. Then comes a comic deflation. The congregation, seen "behind the glass", stands "singing", presumably hymns, and drowns "the whistling grass / Their ponies munch". The wind's cosmic voice is outsung once a week and eaten by ponies the rest of the time.
The form supports this balance. The poem is fourteen tercets, and in each the first and third lines rhyme while the middle line stays unrhymed and runs longer. The third line is cut short to a few syllables, so every stanza ends with a small drop. The rhymes sometimes carry the argument. "Birth" and "earth" chime in the wind's speech, folding a whole life into one sound. The rhythm is a loose, speech-like iambic, and sentences run straight across the stanza breaks. A reader is carried along as if listening to someone thinking aloud, which suits the poem's tentative mood.
That tentativeness peaks at the end. "Somewhere, / Near or far off, there's a man could / Be happy here" is a modest hope, not a promise. Thomas then imagines the gods in the same spot. They are "of inhuman stature dire, / As poets say / Who have not seen them clearly", a gentle jab at poets' grand pictures. They could be happy here, he suggests, only if they did not "startle and shudder cold / Under the sun" at the wind in the "grass-blades stiff". The last two lines make the wind older than the divine: "When gods were young / This wind was old." The rhyme of "cold" with "old" shuts the poem like a door.
Judging by the text, the humble churchgoers seem to cope better than the gods. They sing, they sit in the sunlight, and they do not shudder. What makes the poem significant is that it refuses both easy comfort and easy despair. The wind gets the last word, and its claim to age and permanence is never disproved. Yet the warm stones, the hearth-like chapel and the munching ponies are given nearly as much space. Thomas lets a vast, impersonal idea of time sit beside the small facts of a Sunday service, in plain language that makes the largeness feel quiet rather than grand.