Most poems about encounters with strangers end up flattering the poet. Edward Thomas's does the opposite: it begins as a small comedy of haggling and ends as an admission of debt. At a fair a fortnight before Christmas, a Romany woman tells the speaker he has a lucky face, and he privately decides she is the luckier one, with her "grace / And impudence in rags." She asks for a penny, he pleads poverty ("Unless you can give change for a sovereign, my dear"), and she lowers her demand to half a pipeful of tobacco. He gives it, and she laughs, content "with that much victory." The speaker is left feeling he got the better of nobody. He should have given more, but she is gone before he can "translate to its proper coin / Gratitude for her grace."
That image of gratitude as something that must be changed into money carries the poem's central idea. The speaker owes something that coins cannot settle, and the next lines turn on himself: "I pay nothing now with the dipping of my pen." The poem is the payment he is making, and he knows it is worth nothing to the people it describes. The admission makes the poem more honest than a simple celebration of free-spirited wanderers would be.
The debt grows with the woman's brother, whose music the speaker also gets for free. He drums a tambourine and stamps, and the passing workmen grin. His mouth-organ turns into a "rascally Bacchanal dance," a phrase that brings the pagan wine-god into a muddy English fair. The tune is "Over the hills and far away," a title that suggests leaving and wandering. Thomas quotes it twice, once in the middle and once at the very end, so the song works like a refrain that the poem cannot shake off.
The form suits this mix of chat and haunting. The lines are long and loose, close to speech, and many spill over the page, so the dialogue sounds natural. Yet almost every line is locked into a rhyming couplet. The rhymes often land with a comic snap, as in "rejoin" and "coin," or in the slightly overstretched "be" and "Romany," which leaves the foreign-sounding word hanging at the line's end. The result is a jaunty, ballad-like movement that keeps the first half light. As the poem darkens, the same couplets begin to feel like a steady beat under a different mood.
The turn comes in the catalogue of the fair: farmer, auctioneer, cheap-jack, balloon-man, drover, and then the animals, "Pig, turkey, goose, and duck, Christmas Corpses to be." The capital letters make a merry crowd of livestock into a row of future carcasses, so death is already present in the market. The next line brings in the "kneeling ox," a nativity image, only to say that even this holy animal lacked "eyes like the Romany." The boy's glance outlasts everything else, including the sacred picture.
At night the effect deepens. The boy "peopled for me the hollow wooded land," meaning that the memory of him fills an empty landscape. The speaker, searching it "like a ghost new-arrived," seems barely alive himself. The darkness has "gradations" and resembles "an underworld of death, but for the spark / In the Gypsy boy's black eyes." The word "spark" matters because it is small and bright, and it is the only thing between the darkness and a total underworld. The poem's final image, a "crescent moon," is also a thin curve of light.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with an ordinary scene. It is full of period vocabulary and attitudes, including the title's word and a certain romantic gaze, but it never pretends that gaze is generous. The speaker admits he took more than he gave, and that his art cannot return the favour. The poem ends on a tune and a sliver of moon, with the debt still unpaid, and that is why it lingers.