A gamekeeper who "had not / Much lead or gold" is hardly the usual subject for a poem, and Edward Thomas seems well aware of it. In "Under the Woods" he gives the man six short stanzas and then lets him fade almost out of sight. By the end, what survives is not a gravestone or a story but a dead stoat, "shrivelled and green". The poem is about how quickly a life can be forgotten, and about how oddly and thinly the physical world keeps its records.
It opens like a fairy tale: "When these old woods were young". The thrushes sing "as sweetly" as ever, because the song passes down through "ancestors" while the people come and go. The poem then builds the past out of absences: "There was no garden here, / Apples nor mistletoe; / No children dear / Ran to and fro." Listing what was missing quietly summons what the speaker's present seems to contain, such as gardens, apples and running children. The keeper sits awkwardly between the two worlds. The cottage is "New then", yet he is already "old", so he arrives in the story near the end of his own life.
The form is plain and strict. Each of the six stanzas follows the same pattern: two lines of about six syllables, then two of about four, rhymed abab. The shortened third and fourth lines make every stanza fall away at the close, like a breath running out. Most of the words are single syllables ("lead or gold", "thatched cot", "shed wall"), which gives the poem the bare, handed-down sound of a nursery rhyme or ballad. The rhymes are mostly clean (young/sung, here/dear, cot/not, old/gold). They slacken in places, though. "Ancestors" and "years" only half-chime, as do "about" and "shot", and "memories" and "his". Judging by where this happens, the music seems to fail to close just where the poem is dealing with time and loss.
The keeper's own stanzas are gentle. "Most silent beech and yew" hushes the scene, and the line "Seldom he shot" makes him a mild figure for his trade. Pairing "lead" with "gold" is a nice touch, since it suggests he was short of both ammunition and money. His walk through the woods is described in slightly bent, old-fashioned syntax ("As he went round about / The woods to view"), which adds to the ballad ring.
The turn comes with "But now that he is gone / Out of most memories". The word "most" is quietly generous, because it leaves room for a few people who still remember him, perhaps the speaker among them. Then comes "Still lingers on", a phrase more at home with ghosts than with animals, and here it is applied to "A stoat of his". The irony is hard to miss. A man who "seldom" shot is now recalled, if at all, by a kill, presumably one of his own. Of everything he did in those woods, the only trace left is a dead predator on a wall.
The last stanza takes things away one at a time. The stoat is "shrivelled", it has "no scent at all", and it is "barely seen". Touch, smell and sight all withdraw. "Green" is the odd word. It is the colour of the living woods, but here it seems to belong to mould or decay, as if the surrounding growth were already claiming the body. The relic is fading as surely as the memory it stands for.
The poem never says any of this outright. There is no moral and no lament, and its voice stays level to the last line. Words like "these old woods", "this thatched cot" and "this shed wall" place the speaker physically on the spot, looking. The poem ends on the flat, concrete words "On this shed wall", with nothing added to console us. Its force lies in that restraint. It honours an unimportant man by showing exactly how little of him is left, and it makes the reader feel that smallness more sharply than any grand statement about mortality could.