Edward Thomas begins with a daydream of wealth. Imagine owning all the land "a man in a day could ride", then watch the speaker hand it over to his son for the price of a single song. The poem is a fairy-tale bargain with a legal tone, and its central idea is that the things most worth having can't be owned, and that a blackbird's dawn song is worth more than any estate. By the end the speaker has turned from landlord into tenant, and the only rent he can offer is music.
The first long sentence is a catalogue of place-names: "Wingle Tye and Margaretting / Tye,--and Skreens, Gooshays, and Cockerells, / Shellow, Rochetts, Bandish, and Pickerells." Read aloud, they bounce and clatter, and they sound local, odd and unpolished. They are not pretty labels for a postcard countryside. The list makes ownership feel generous and enormous, but it also works as a chant, so the poem is already singing before it says it wants a song. Thomas fills the list with working detail as well: "plough-horses steam" in cold air, plovers "Fling and whimper", and hedges are ones "that lovers / Love". The line break after "lovers" lets the repeated word land with a small, affectionate bump.
The form is mostly rhyming couplets in short, brisk lines of about four beats, loose enough to sound like talk. The rhymes are often playful or deliberately lumpy: "Cockerells" with "Pickerells", "Lillyputs" with "ruts", "because I" with "pie". That last pair is almost comic, and it sets up the poem's strangest moment. If his son won't allow him the blackbirds, the speaker threatens to shoot every one and bake them, leaving "His Essex blackbirds, every one, / And I was left old and alone." The tone swings from whimsy to a real chill in the space of two lines. The threat is absurd, but the loneliness behind it is believable. The logic is tangled, as in a folk tale or a riddle, but the point is clear. Destroying the songbirds would leave the land itself empty, however much of it he held.
Among the details of the first list, one phrase stands out: the thrush "sings well / His proverbs untranslatable." Birdsong is imagined as wisdom, but wisdom that can't be put into other words or turned into anything else. That idea sits under the whole poem. A song can't be bought, sold or paraphrased, so it makes a strange kind of currency. There is an irony in that, because the poem is itself a translation of sorts, a human attempt to carry a bird's music into words. Judging by how the final stanza is built, the poem may even be the speaker's rent payment. He promises a song "As sweet as a blackbird's, and as long-- / No more", and what we have just read is about that length.
The second stanza replays the first list almost exactly, but with a small grammatical change: "and" becomes "or." "Margaretting or Wingle Tye, / Or it might be Skreens, Gooshays, or Cockerells." What was an accumulating treasure becomes a set of alternatives, as though the speaker is shrugging and offering any place at all, because none matters as much as the song he owes. Possession has been loosened into something casual. The last line, "Should be his till the cart tracks had no ruts", is a good closing image. Ruts are the permanent marks of ordinary rural traffic, so the son's inheritance is promised for as long as the countryside stays as it is, which means for good.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it manages to be a joke, a threat and a love poem to a landscape in twenty-odd lines. Thomas, who wrote about the English countryside in prose before he turned to verse, doesn't give it a solemn speech. He gives it names, weather, animals and a very odd contract, and lets the humour and the loneliness sit side by side. It argues, without lecturing, that wealth counted in acres is thin beside a few minutes of birdsong at dawn.