The first line promises no story, only a habit of mind: "Often and often it came back again." The speaker is haunted by one day, when he crossed a "horizon ridge / To a new country", and the poem is his attempt to say why. What he finds is not a dramatic event but a delayed understanding. "I did not know my loss / Till one day twelve months later," when, leaning on his spade, he suddenly saw everything he had left behind. The central idea is that we often feel a loss only once distance has made it permanent, and that no effort of memory can then undo it.
Thomas withholds almost everything we might expect. The loss is never named, and we are not told why the speaker crossed the ridge or what he left. Instead we get hard, particular things: "half-gaps that were stiles once in the hedge," a "pack of scarlet clouds running across / The harvest evening." The cloud image is vivid in a restless way, as if the sky itself were on the move. The inn "where all were kind, / All were strangers" is the sharpest detail. The repeated "all" and the comma that stops short set warmth and anonymity side by side. The people were kind, and he still belonged nowhere among them. Judging by the poem, something was already slipping away that evening, though he could not feel it.
The moment of recognition is deliberately plain: a man with a spade. The tool ties him to labour and to one patch of ground, and "leaned" returns later as a repeated habit, so that remembering becomes a physical pause in the working day. The place is "far beyond the sky-line," yet he sees "it all." Memory crosses the distance without crossing it. The syntax enacts this. The opening sentence runs eight lines before it stops, spilling over line endings like a mind circling something it cannot settle on. The plan to "do the same / Again for two days and a night" is flat and practical, a journey measured in days. Its "Again" echoes the poem's first line, as if the wish to return and the compulsion to remember were one thing.
Then comes the turn: "Recall / Was vain." The line break leaves "Recall" hanging, and the word works twice, as remembering and as calling back. Thomas answers it with landscape. A "restless brook" cannot "turn back and climb the waterfall" to the lake that "rests and stirs not in its nook." The natural reading is that the speaker is the brook, always running on, and the past is the still lake above it. The final image makes the mountain a body: the lake lies "in the hollow of the collar-bone / Under the mountain's head of rush and stone." The tenderness of "hollow" sits against the bleakness of "rush and stone," so the lost place seems both cradled and out of reach.
The sound pattern is worth listening for. The rhymes are widely spaced and interlaced, so quiet that the poem passes for plain speech. "Again" is answered by "then" five lines later, and "ridge" by "hedge." Across the poem's second half, "all," "Recall" and "waterfall" chime, linking the vision ("saw it all") to the failure ("Recall was vain") to the fall that cannot be climbed. Only at the very end does the rhyme tighten into a couplet, "bone" and "stone," whose heavy vowels close the poem like a door. At nineteen lines it runs five past a sonnet, as if the form had been stretched by the feeling.
The poem matters for its restraint. The title echoes the old phrase "over the hills and far away," with its lure of somewhere better, but the poem is about the pain of a place you cannot return to. Thomas does not explain or console. He trusts a spade, a stile and a pool of water to carry the weight, and the unnamed loss feels larger for being unnamed.