Edward Thomas's farmhouse looks like the most restful place in England, and the poem spends half its length persuading us of it before the turf begins to heave. The first stanza is all warmth and softness. The house "smiles" on its "riverside plat" (an old word for a small patch of ground), and the long closing line, "So velvet-hushed and cool under the warm tiles," is made of slow, muffled sounds, with its v's, l's and m's. Cool and warm sit together in the one line, as if the place were comfortable in every direction.
The second stanza turns that comfort into something slightly more complicated. The house is "caught / Far out of reach / Of the road's dust / And the dusty thought / Of passers-by." Dust starts as a literal thing on the road and becomes a quality of thinking, so travellers are dull and hurried while the house is somehow exempt. Yet each of them "Stops, and turns, and must / Look down at it." That "must" is a compulsion, and the final simile sharpens it: they look "like a wasp at the muslined peach." The wasp brings greed and a little menace, and the muslin suggests fruit that has been wrapped and shielded. The house is tempting and veiled, something to look at from outside and not to enter. Even the first stanza's praise is about being "pleasant to look at / And remember," so the poem has already introduced remembering without saying whose memory matters.
Then comes the turn: "But another house stood there long before." The colon after it is a small drop. The ground now behaves "as if above graves," and the turf "heaves / Above its stones." Light gives way to "Dark hangs the sycamore," where the inverted word order makes the tree itself seem to sag. The imagery is almost gothic, with a kennel, bones and "the black dog that shakes his chain and moans." The stones, bones and moans rhyme on one long, mournful vowel. The dog is never explained. Judging by the poem, he belongs to the vanished house, and whether he is a ghost or a memory is left open.
The last stanza turns from seeing to hearing. The first half of the poem was visual and tactile, and "hushed" was its key word. Now the dog barks, and "dark echoes reply" across the river. The past is "hollow," which suggests both an empty space and a place that sends sound back. It "Half yields the dead that never / More than half hidden lie." The line break after "never" holds back "More" for a beat, so the dead really are only half out of view. Even the rhymes echo: "river," "never" and "for ever" repeat the same ending sound, as if the stanza were answering itself. The closing line, "And out they creep and back again for ever," is almost all single syllables, and its creeping movement goes out and back, with no resolution.
The form works the same way, with a pleasant surface and something uneasy beneath. Each stanza has seven lines, but the rhyme pattern changes every time (the first runs *abcacbb*, the last *abcbaca*). The ear keeps getting chimes without ever settling into a fixed pattern. Short third lines such as "On the riverside plat:" contrast with the long final lines, which stretch out and trail away. Some rhymes are not quite full, like "graves" and "heaves," which adds to the sense of a place that does not fit together neatly.
What makes the poem significant is that it never states its moral. It does not announce that beauty hides decay. It sets two houses on one patch of ground and lets us see that there are two ways of knowing a place. Passers-by see the sunny surface and carry it away in memory, but the land itself remembers something else, and it breaks out when something startles it. This refuses the postcard version of the English countryside and treats the landscape as layered with earlier lives. It does so in a few quiet, precise images, where the sweetness of the peach and the moan of the chained dog belong to the same view.