The poem opens with a question that sounds like a deathbed worry, "What will they do when I am gone?", and then answers it flatly, before the line is even over: "It is plain." The word is typical of the poem's manner. There is no wailing and no grand farewell. The speaker simply works out the answer and, with some reluctance, accepts it. Then, over twelve lines, he tests whether a more flattering answer might be true. The poem is about wanting to matter to strangers, and about how thin that hope can be.
The first simile is easy to misread. "They will do without me as the rain / Can do without the flowers and the grass." The rain is "they," and the flowers and grass are the speaker. Those flowers "profit by it and must perish without," so the dependence runs one way. The speaker needs the world, and the world, like the weather, does not need him. Line 4 ends on the word "without," with nothing after it, and the line itself seems to trail off into absence.
The scene that follows is small and ordinary. The speaker has "but seen them in the loud street pass," and "I was naught to them." The word "loud" matters here, since the street is a place of noise and busyness where no one listens. When he turns "to see them disappearing carelessly," the adverb works twice. It means free of worry, and it also means without care for him. The turning is his only action in the whole poem, a small attempt to catch someone's eye, and it goes unanswered.
The pivot comes with "But what if." The next sentence is built as a mirror: "I in them as they in me / Nourished what has great value and no price." The phrase "I in them as they in me" is symmetrical, like a balance coming level. The speaker tries out the idea that the exchange was mutual, that something precious passed between him and these strangers without either of them knowing. "Great value and no price" is a neat paradox. The street is a place of buying, selling and passing, and what he imagines escapes all of that. He then flips the opening image: "Almost I thought that rain thirsts for a draught / Which only in the blossom's chalice lies." Now the rain needs the flower. "Chalice" brings in a faint religious note, as if the blossom held something sacred.
The form carries this change of mood. The lines are loose iambic pentameter, close to ordinary speech, and sentences spill across line endings ("I turned about / To see them…"). The rhyme begins in tidy couplets (plain/rain) and then interlocks (grass/pass, without/about). It settles in the last four lines into an alternating pattern, price/lies and draught/laughed. "Price" and "lies" do not quite match, since the s and z sounds differ. That slight mismatch is fitting, because the hope in these lines is not quite sound either. The final rhyme is a true one, and it falls on "laughed."
That ending is the poem's sharpest move. The word "Almost" has already shown that the speaker does not fully believe his idea. Then "that one," a single figure picked out from the anonymous crowd, "turned back and lightly laughed." The gesture mirrors his own earlier turning, but it arrives as an answer to the daydream, not to him. The poem never says what the laugh means. It may be mockery, or amusement at being watched, or just the ease of someone with no thought of the man behind. "Lightly" fits any of these. The laugh is brief and costs the stranger nothing, and it is enough to dissolve the speaker's hope.
The poem is significant because it refuses both comfort and bitterness. It lets the consoling thought, that we feed other people's lives unseen, be spoken and then punctured, without insisting that the thought was foolish. The reader is left with the speaker's dignity and his uncertainty. The poem is also a lesson in how much a short text can do with plain words: a question, a rain-and-flower comparison, a street, and a laugh. Its closing line is quiet and unresolved, and it stays with the reader for that reason.