Four short stanzas, a few animals and one frightened walker are all Edward Thomas needs to turn a winter night into a confrontation. The poem opens with a picture as soft as the snow it describes, fallow deer moving "invisible" through the dark. It ends with the claim that the whole "universe of sight" is feeble against night. In between, the speaker finds he isn't watching the dark from outside. He is standing in it, afraid, and the poem asks what that fear is made of and whether it has to be there.
The first stanza builds its world from opposites. We never see the deer. We know them only because the poem says so, and the alliteration of "fallow fawns" and the hushed rhymes of "go" and "doe" make them move quietly. Then comes the paradox "the winds blow / Fast as the stars are slow." Rushing air and crawling stars are measured against each other, so the night feels frantic and endlessly still at once.
The second stanza turns the dark into a predator. It "haunts round" stealthily, a verb that suggests both a ghost and an animal stalking its prey. When "a lamp goes," whether it is put out or carried away, the dark arrives "at a swifter bound / Than the swiftest hound." The hound quietly links this stanza to the deer of the first, because the dark pursues the speaker as hounds pursue game. Then the metaphor changes: "all else is drowned." Darkness is now a flood as well as a hunter, and the poem has given it no sound at all.
The third stanza brings in "I." The speaker joins a list held together by repeated "and": "I and star and wind and deer." The grammar puts him on the same level as the stars and the animals, but the next lines undo that comfort: "near, / Yet far." The pause after "near" shows each creature sitting alone inside the same darkness. With sight gone, hearing takes over, and fear "Drums on my ear." The closing phrase, "that sage company drear," is deliberately awkward, with its adjectives pushed behind the noun. "Sage" means wise and "drear" means gloomy, so the company is both at once. Judging by the tone, the speaker feels the wind, stars and deer know something about the night that he doesn't.
The ending is the cleverest part of the poem. Light is described as "weak and little," and then the sentence swells. Light becomes "all the universe of sight," and then "love and delight," everything people cherish. Against all that stands "the might ... of night," but Thomas interrupts the phrase with "If you love it not." The reader has to wait for "night," which lands last, on the rhyme. The condition is the poem's central idea. Night overpowers us only when we don't love it. The speaker's drumming fear suggests he doesn't love it yet, but the "if" leaves open the possibility that he could.
The form supports this. Every stanza uses a single rhyme five times (snow, go, doe, blow, slow; round, sound, bound, hound, drowned; and so on). The sound keeps coming back with no way out, like the dark and like the drum in the speaker's ear. The line lengths work the same way. Two longer lines are followed by two clipped ones and a longer closing line, so each stanza seems to speed up and then fall. Nearly all the words are plain and short, which makes the fear feel immediate rather than literary.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it won't settle for easy terror or easy comfort. It doesn't claim the dark is harmless, and it doesn't pretend the speaker is brave. It suggests that fear is partly a relationship, and that the way we feel about the dark helps decide how much power it has. Placing that thought in a final conditional clause makes the reader finish the poem still thinking about it.