Edward Thomas gives us a woman who listens to birds as if they were gossiping about her, and the poem's quiet force comes from how long it waits before saying why. The first stanza is almost playful. She "dotes" on what thrush, blackbird, hawk, heron and owl have to say, and the roll-call of species sounds like a child reciting names. Only the last two lines tilt the mood: "They never say a word to her / About her lover." The central idea is already there. A grieving person wants the world to acknowledge her loss, and the world, in the form of cheerful, indifferent birds, will not.
The second stanza reveals the loss, and does it casually. The birds "sing and chatter / Just as when he was not a ghost." The word "ghost" arrives sideways, in a subordinate clause, and the poem never makes a speech about death. Meanwhile her reactions swing between "laughs" and "cries," and the two charges she levels at the birds are childishness and carelessness. The triple rhyme of "childishness," "carelessness" and "loverless" makes the stanza almost tumble forward, and its last word is the bleakest. The birds don't even "ask her what she has lost / Or what is the matter." That plain, schoolyard phrasing makes her loneliness sound ordinary and therefore believable.
The third stanza turns from accusation to hope. Her suspicion that blackbirds "hide / A secret" and thrushes "chide" shows her trying to turn birdsong into meaning. Look at the phrasing "because she thinks death can divide / Her from her lover." The verb "thinks" leaves a question hanging. Either the birds scold her for believing death separates them, or the poem gently doubts that it does. Thomas doesn't settle it. The last image has her asleep, "trying to translate / The word the cuckoo cries to his mate / Over and over." Grief has followed her into her dreams, where she is still working at the translation. The cuckoo's call is a pair of repeated notes, so "over and over" describes both the bird and her mind going round the same ground. The cuckoo is also addressing "his mate," which is exactly what she has lost.
The form carries much of this feeling. Each stanza has seven lines rhyming roughly aaabccb, and the long lines are brisk four-beat lines that sound like talk or song. Lines four and seven are cut short to two beats, and both end on a soft two-syllable rhyme: "plover" and "lover," then "chatter" and "matter." In the first and third stanzas the rhyme words "lover" and "over" echo each other across the poem, so the same word is returned to like a sore spot. Those short lines work like a catch of breath after the longer run, and they are where the sadness settles. There is also a slight comic clumsiness in rhyming "woodpecker" with "her." It suits the way the stanza piles up birds, and it makes the turn to "lover" land harder.
The poem's vocabulary also keeps the human and the bird in tension. "Songless plover" is a small, striking detail, because it is the one creature named that does not sing. Judging by the imagery, it quietly mirrors the woman's silence. The verbs "dotes," "fancied," "chide" and "translate" all belong to human relationships, such as affection, imagination, scolding and language, and she pushes them onto creatures who have no interest in them. Nature does not mourn here, and she cannot stop wishing it would.
What makes the poem matter is its restraint. It never describes her face, names the lover, or explains how he died, and it avoids sentimental language about heartbreak. The pain shows in small, stubborn behaviour: laughing at birds, crying at them, falling asleep over a cuckoo's two notes. The poem treats her obsession tenderly rather than mocking it, and it ends without comfort, only a call repeated "over and over," which she keeps trying to understand.