Edward Thomas begins with a cold, bare hilltop and a man who cannot decide which way to walk. The sea is dim, the sun "shy," and the grasses stay white with frost. The poem is short and never leaves that spot, yet by the end it has moved from a practical question about the road to the biggest question there is: how to live, given that we die.
The opening landscape does a lot of quiet work. "Skeleton weeds" puts death into the scenery before any voice mentions it, and "the never-dry, / Rough, long grasses" has a stubborn, weary feel. The smoke of the traveller's-joy (wild clematis, which looks like drifting smoke when it goes to seed) hangs over "hawthorn berry and hazel tuft." The names are plain and local, and the sentences are short and stiff with cold: "The dim sea glints chill." The finger-post, a signpost shaped like a pointing hand, stands at the centre. Strangely, we never learn what it says. The speaker reads the sign and asks "Which way shall I go?", but the poem is never interested in destinations.
What answers him is a pair of voices, which seem to be different versions of himself, though the poem never says so. The first claims that at twenty he "would not have doubted so." The second, "gentle with scorn," replies that at twenty he "wished you had never been born." That rhyme of "scorn" with "born" is the bleakest moment in the poem, and it undercuts any simple nostalgia for youth. Neither age is allowed to be the golden one. The conversation then turns forward, to what it would be "to be sixty by this same post." Thomas himself was killed in 1917 and never reached sixty, so the question reads differently now, though that is our hindsight, not something the poem states.
The tone changes with the reply: "You shall see," he laughed, "and I had to join his laughter." The laughter is the poem's turning point. It is not cheerful, but it is a kind of acceptance. What follows is a strange consolation: whatever happens, "A mouthful of earth to remedy all / Regrets and wishes shall freely be given." Death is pictured as a mouthful of earth, physical and almost comic, and it is offered as a cure. Even heaven is imagined without sentimentality. If it has "a flaw," that flaw is "freedom to wish," and the wish would be to be back "here or anywhere talking to me," in any weather. In other words, the best afterlife the poem can picture is this cold hilltop and this argument with oneself.
The form supports that idea. The poem is written in rhymed couplets, but the lines vary in length and the sentences ignore the line endings. At first, rhymes like "shy" and "never-dry," or "frost" and "finger-post," land neatly. Then the speech runs on, with "befall / all" and "given / heaven" half hidden in the flow, until the last twelve lines or so become one long, breathless sentence. The rhythm is a loose four-beat line that is close to speech but never quite prose. It gives the sense of someone thinking aloud and getting carried away.
The closing catalogue is the most moving part: "The sun and the frost, the land and the sea, / Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring." Thomas ends the list on Spring, not Winter, which is a small hint of renewal, though that is an inference from the order of the words. The phrase "a poor man of any sort, down to a king" levels everyone, and "standing upright out in the air" strips human life to its bare dignity: being alive, upright, in the weather, and uncertain.
The last line, "Wondering where he shall journey, O where?", does not answer the first question, and that is the point. The "O" is part sigh and part song. The signpost gives no directions, but the poem suggests that the wondering is itself what makes life worth wanting back. That is why it lingers. It does not comfort us with a destination. It makes the act of standing at a crossroads, cold and undecided, seem like something we might one day miss.