Edward Thomas starts by shrugging at words. "Old Man, or Lad's-love,--in the name there's / nothing," he says, and the sentence stumbles as it goes, leaving "nothing" stranded at the start of the next line. The names are pretty enough that he likes them, but they cling to the plant no more than a label clings to a jar. What matters is the thing itself: a grey-green, feathery bush with a bitter smell. Around it the poem builds its central idea, that a scent can carry the weight of a memory without handing the memory over. The speaker knows this smell matters to him. He cannot say why.
To explore that, Thomas brings in a child, who sets the poem's stage in a few light touches. She snips the tips, shrivels the shreds onto the path, sniffs her fingers "and runs off." She says "not a word," and the short, flat clause suits her silence. The speaker wonders what she will keep from these moments, and his guess is a list: "garden rows, and ancient damson-trees / Topping a hedge, a bent path to a door, / A low thick bush beside the door, and me / Forbidding her to pick." The surprise is that last item. He imagines himself reduced to a figure in someone else's future memory, a scolding voice at the edge of the picture. There is gentle irony in his confidence, because the rest of the poem shows him failing to do for himself what he predicts so easily for her.
His own case is stated plainly: "Where first I met the bitter scent is lost." The syntax then begins to circle. "I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds, / Sniff them and think and sniff again and try / Once more to think." The repeated "and" makes the sentence loop like the habit it describes. The poem's strangest claim comes next. He cannot like the scent, yet he would give up sweeter ones "with no meaning" rather than lose this bitter one. Meaning, even unreadable meaning, outranks pleasure.
The last verse paragraph is where the poem tightens. "I have mislaid the key" is an almost domestic phrase, the language of a man patting his pockets, and its calm makes the loss feel more unsettling. He is "listening, lying in wait," an image that combines patience and a hunter's alertness, but nothing comes. Then the earlier list returns with every item cancelled: "No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush." Even the plant's names have vanished, so the opening argument about names comes round again with more force. What is left is "an avenue, dark, nameless, without end." The word "nameless" answers the first line, and "without end" refuses the comfort of a conclusion.
The form supports all of this. The poem is in unrhymed, loosely iambic lines, blank verse that Thomas keeps close to speech. Sentences run across line-endings ("snipping the tips and / shrivelling"), and pauses fall in unexpected places, so the voice seems to be thinking aloud rather than performing. Rhyme would have given the poem a click of closure, and the poem is about the absence of that click. Even the blunt rhythm of "I see and I hear nothing" works against any easy music, leaving only plain words and a stalled mind.
The poem's significance lies in how honestly it treats memory. Many poems about the past offer a vivid scene, a lost garden or a golden childhood. This one gives the feeling of remembering with the content removed, and that experience is oddly familiar: a smell, a tune or a light that insists it means something. The title adds a further layer. "Old Man" is a plant's name, but by the end it also seems to describe the speaker, an older figure sniffing at a sprig for a past he can't reach. That reading is an inference, but the poem invites it, since the child's memories are still ahead of her and his are already out of reach.