Edward Thomas gives almost the whole of "The Child on the Cliffs" to a boy's voice, and the poem's trick is how ordinary that voice sounds for as long as possible. He tastes a root, watches a grasshopper, tells his mother to look. Only in the last four lines do we see where his attention has been heading all along. He would like to be dead, as long as he could go on hearing a bell.
The opening stanza is full of small, bright, slightly odd observations. The flower's root "has the taste of quinine", a bitter, medicinal flavour tucked into a sunlit scene. "Things are strange to-day on the cliff," the boy announces, and his comparison of the grasshopper to someone at a "sewing-machine" is the kind of domestic leap only a child would make. Yet the detail "I lie so still" quietly matters. Stillness is what he later wants to take much further.
The second stanza makes the strangeness grander. The grasshopper on his mother's book becomes "a green knight in a dazzling market-place", so the page turns into a crowded square and the insect into a figure from a story. Then comes the sea. The foam "stretches a white arm out like a girl's", and the image is pretty and a little unsettling, since the sea is shown reaching toward someone. The boy doesn't seem to notice how inviting he has made it sound.
In the third stanza he reasons like a child. Fishes and gulls "ring no bells", and there is no chapel "between here and Devon", so the bell must be "Somewhere under the sea or up in heaven". Judging by the text, he is looking across water from the Welsh coast, and his own phrase "not in all Wales" supports that. His two guesses are worth a second look, because both are places the dead might be. The mother's reply is the only speech in quotation marks, and it is flat and sensible: it is only the bell "on the buoy". She is right, but her explanation changes nothing. The boy answers that it is the sweetest sound he has ever heard, and the facts simply slide off his feeling.
The form supports this slow drift. Each six-line stanza ends in a couplet, such as "look" and "book" or "bay" and "to-day", which gives a feeling of small closed circles. But the rhymes loosen as the poem goes on. "Curls" and "girl's" only half-chime, and "foam" and "come" are an eye-rhyme rather than a true one. The final pair, "happily" and "be", barely rhymes at all. The lines themselves are long and conversational, and they tumble over the line-breaks ("So leave / Your book") the way a child's speech runs on. Interruptions like "hark" catch the moment of listening. The last line, "I should be happy if that could be", is almost entirely one-syllable words, and its "if" is shy and conditional. It sounds like a child asking permission.
What keeps the poem from being merely morbid is the reason behind the wish. The boy doesn't picture death as terror or pain. He pictures it as sweetness, stillness and sound, and above all as a way of bringing his mother to him: "you would often come / And rest, listening happily." She has been absorbed in her book while he talks, and his fantasy gives her a reason to sit beside him and be at peace. Even his death is shaped around her comfort.
That is where the poem gets its quiet power. The mother has the last word in the third stanza and then says nothing. She doesn't comfort him or correct him, and the poem leaves her silence hanging over the cliff. A reader is left with the sweetness of the bell and the unease of a child who finds it so easy to imagine lying beneath the foam. The poem never tells us how to feel about that, and it trusts the child's plain words to carry the weight.