At a country crossroads, a blacksmith's forge, an inn and a shop fill the air with human noise, and above them a stand of aspens keeps up a murmur of its own. Edward Thomas starts with this ordinary scene and slowly turns it into a statement about his own art. The trees "talk together / Of rain", and the poem's central idea is that they cannot help it. Whether anyone listens or not, and whether or not there is a village below to hear, aspens must shake their leaves. By the end, the poet admits he is the same kind of creature.
The first two stanzas set up a contrast of sounds. The village is loud in a warm, specific way: "the ringing / Of hammer, shoe, and anvil" comes out of the smithy, which Thomas calls a "cavern", as if the forge were something half-wild. From the inn come "the clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing". The list, with its commas and its sudden "random", sounds like a crowd. Yet it is the trees that are given speech: they "talk." The phrase "for these fifty years" marks the village noise as something human-sized and temporary.
Then the poem darkens. In the third and fourth stanzas the sentence stretches across the stanza break, and its syntax is knotty enough to make a reader slow down. The sense seems to be that the whisper is "not drowned" by the village, and that at night, over "lightless pane and footless road, / Empty as sky", it calls up the "ghosts" of the smithy and inn, now "a silent smithy, a silent inn". "Footless" is a strange, vivid word, a road with nobody walking it. The aspen sound turns the crossroads into "a ghostly room", and the poem insists this happens in every condition: "the bare moonlight or the thick-furred gloom", "tempest or the night of nightingales". "Thick-furred" makes darkness feel muffling and animal, and the chiming of "night" and "nightingales" gives the line a sleepy, tender sound. The trees' murmur works almost like memory, filling an empty space with what used to be there.
The fifth stanza is the turning point. "And it would be the same were no house near." The aspens do not exist for the village's benefit. Men "may hear / But need not listen, more than to my rhymes." The poet slips himself into the comparison, and it is wryly deflating: his poems, like the rustling, are background that people may politely ignore. The last stanza makes the link complete. "While they and I have leaves" puns on the foliage of trees and the leaves of a book. Both he and the aspens are bound to their nature: "We cannot other than an aspen be". The old-fashioned phrasing sounds like a vow, or a shrug. The trees' sound is "ceaselessly, unreasonably" grieving, "or so men think who like a different tree". That last clause is quietly defiant. The grief may be only an interpretation by people who prefer sturdier, quieter trees, and perhaps by readers who prefer louder poets.
The form fits this modest stubbornness. Six quatrains rhyme ABAB, and the lines move in a loose iambic pentameter that keeps the rhythm of speech. The rhymes are plain, often simple pairs such as "shop/top" and "near/hear", so the music never draws attention to itself. When the poem does call itself "rhymes", it sounds almost apologetic. The steady pattern also works like the rustling it describes, a repeating, low-level sound that carries on under the changes of mood.
The poem is significant because it takes a familiar Romantic theme, the poet as a voice in nature, and removes its grandeur. There is no triumphant song and no promise of being heard. What remains is compulsion, honesty about being overlooked, and a sad but dignified loyalty to one's own way of speaking.