Most love poems pile up compliments. Edward Thomas's poem to his wife Helen does something stranger. It spends twenty-two lines listing what he would like to give her and never hands anything over. The whole thing lives in the conditional ("I would give you", "Had I", "If I could choose"), and that grammar of wishing is its real subject. What looks like generosity turns into a quiet confession of how little he feels able to offer.
The gifts begin grandly: youth, "loveliness and truth", children "as many as your heart / Might wish for". But the list keeps changing texture. "A clear eye as good as mine" is oddly practical after loveliness and truth, and the next line, "Lands, waters, flowers, wine", drops verbs and conjunctions altogether, setting things down side by side like objects on a table. Then the mood darkens: "all you have lost / Upon the travelling waters tossed, / Or given to me." That last phrase slips in almost casually, yet it puts the speaker among the things she has spent. The poem suggests that Helen has given more than she has received. It is also telling that "waters" appears twice, first among the pleasures and then among the losses, as if gain and loss were made of the same element.
The turn comes with the image of a "great treasure-house" where he could take "Anything from any shelf". The word "shelf" shrinks the grand building to something almost domestic, a cupboard in a home. Out of everything on offer, the best gift is not an object: "I would give you back yourself." The line is a beat shorter than its neighbours and has no padding. The word "back" implies that her self has been taken or used up somewhere along the way. Who or what did that, the poem doesn't say, though the earlier "given to me" hints at an answer.
What follows is wiser than romantic. He wishes her "power to discriminate / What you want and want it not too late". "Discriminate" is the longest, most abstract word in a poem of short ones, and it is used in the old sense of telling things apart. The wish is not just for desires but for knowing them in time, and "too late" carries a faint regret. Even his hope for "Many fair days free from care" is balanced by a wish for "heart to enjoy both foul and fair". He does not promise her a life without bad weather, only the ability to enjoy it.
The form helps this tone. The poem is written in rhyming couplets, with short lines of about four beats. Taken alone, those rhymes might sound songlike or even nursery-simple. But sentences keep spilling over the line endings ("store / Offered me", "heart / Might wish", "choose / Freely"), so the syntax overflows the neat pairs and sounds like someone hunting for the right word aloud. The very first rhyme sets the pattern, with "you" rhyming with itself. The poem cannot get past her, and it cannot find anything but the plainest way to say so.
The ending makes the poem more than a list of kind wishes. After everything, he adds: "And myself, too, if I could find / Where it lay hidden and it proved kind." The gift is hedged twice, since he would have to find his self and it would have to prove kind. He calls himself "it", as if his own character were a lost object that might turn out to be unfriendly. Judging by the imagery of hiding, he is unsure of his worth. Meanwhile the rhyme of "find" and "kind" chimes with a reassurance that the sense withholds.
That is where the poem's strength lies. It earns its tenderness by refusing to flatter either of them. The most precious gift comes last, and it is the one the giver is least sure he possesses. A reader finishes it feeling that this doubt is itself a form of love: he would rather offer less and tell the truth about it.