Memory usually needs a trigger, and Edward Thomas builds his poem around that fact. The speaker recalls a single hour spent with a man and his house, and both have already faded, "as a reflection in a rippling brook". The simile works two ways: a reflection is a picture of something, but it is also a picture that won't keep still. Only at the end do we learn why the pair have come back. A bird in a tree has put the scene in front of the speaker's eyes again.
The house comes first, and it is described through absence and surrender. "Empty it sounded" tells us it was heard rather than seen, and what the speaker hears is hollowness. Forest boughs brush the walls, and the mossy tiles have become "part of the squirrels' track", so the roof no longer marks a human boundary and has turned into a stretch of woodland path. The trees look on "from every side", which gives the forest eyes and makes the house seem both hemmed in and watched. Then the man speaks: "Lonely!" he said, "I wish it were lonely." The quotation breaks across a line as if his voice were trailing off, and the meaning stays slippery. Perhaps he longs for a solitude the watching trees deny him. Perhaps he is only turning a visitor's word over. The poem never settles it, and that restraint is much of its power.
The man himself gets the poem's most telling sentence: "He waved good-bye to hide / A sigh that he converted to a laugh." A feeling is spotted and disguised in one movement, and the speaker simply reports it. What follows is a run of images of fading. He "seemed to hang rather than stand", and the verb suggests something suspended and unsupported. The line then breaks on "half", so he is left hanging in the white space, "Ghost-like" on one side and "like a beggar's rag" on the other. The rag is "clean wrung / And useless on the brier", and the archaic "a-washing" stretches the weathering out over "Long years" of "sun and wind and rain". The picture is of a person scoured until almost nothing is left. The speaker stands "at the gate" while the man is "in the house darkness", and that small distance leaves the speaker outside, able to see the man's distress and unable to reach it.
The form is quietly clever. The poem is written in rhymed couplets, but they are loose ones, with lines of uneven length and sentences that spill over the ends: "only / One house", "half / Ghost-like", "clean wrung / And useless". The effect is closer to someone talking than to a recited verse. Rhyme sometimes arrives where we don't expect it. "Only" finds its partner in "lonely", which sits in the middle of the broken line, so the chime reaches across a gap. The short, flat "And that was his" closes off the house's description like a door shutting. The chatty turn, "But why I call back man and house again / Is that...", prepares the ending without announcing it.
That ending is the point. The speaker sees "on a beech-tree's tip" a magpie "veering about, / A magpie like a weathercock in doubt." The repeated "a magpie" shows the mind fixing on the bird. The comparison fits closely, because a weathercock belongs on a roof and is meant to settle and point the way. A weathercock "in doubt" is a house's emblem that has lost its direction, and so it gives shape to a feeling the man had hidden behind a laugh. The poem never says what he doubts. In English folklore a lone magpie is also a sign of sorrow, and that adds a shadow without any explanation. "Now" and "then" fold together, since the speaker sees the same thing as before.
The poem matters because it shows how much can be said by saying little. It doesn't explain the man or give him a history. It trusts a few exact images, the squirrel track, the wrung-out rag and the uncertain bird, to carry a whole mood. It also tells the truth about memory, which keeps what it can attach to an image far more readily than what it can explain.