Three stanzas of wishing, and then a surprise: the speaker announces that he isn't asking for any of it. Edward Thomas's "For These" lays out a small, perfect life, with an acre of land, a loved house, a neat garden and some running water. Only in the last stanza do we learn that these are not what he wants from fate. What he asks for is the ability to be content, and "that something may be sent / To be contented with." The things are the daydream, and the real request is for the feeling that makes any such things enough.
The poem's construction supports this reversal. The first three stanzas contain no main verb. "An acre of land…", "A house…", "A garden…", "A spring, a brook's bend, or at least a pond" pile up as a list of noun phrases, as if the speaker were pointing at things in a catalogue. The sentence only completes in the final stanza, where "For these I ask not" turns the whole list upside down. The title becomes a delayed signal, because we reach "these" long before we know what the speaker will do with them.
The imagery is modest but never dull. The acre sits "between the shore and the hills / Upon a ledge that shows my kingdoms three," and the grand word "kingdoms" is immediately explained as "earth and sky and sea." He owns an acre but claims a whole landscape, because a view costs nothing. Even the land is humble: it is what "the curlew needs not," the leftover ground a wild bird has no use for and a farmer can till. That phrase makes the ambition small and a little comic, as though he wants the scraps of the map.
The house and garden bring in warmth and humour. A house "that shall love me as I love it" is a wonderfully odd wish, since it asks a building to return affection. Love then spills into the birds, as linnets, greenfinches and goldfinches "visit and make love in and flit." The line itself flits. It runs on past its natural stopping point, and the dangling "in" suggests quick, unpredictable movement. The garden is "Broken but neat," a tidy phrase for something imperfect and cared for. Its sunflowers are "fit to be the sign of the Rising Sun," which sounds like a name on an inn sign. The flowers are so bright and so many that they could advertise a place to gather, which shows how much pleasure the speaker takes in a garden he "need never go beyond."
Look, too, at how the wishes shrink. The water is "a spring, a brook's bend, or at least a pond." That "at least" shows him bargaining himself down, almost before he has finished asking.
The form is tightly controlled. Each of the four stanzas rhymes ABBA, so the outer lines wrap around the inner pair like a hedge around a plot, an apt shape for a poem about enclosure and enough. The lines are mostly iambic pentameter, but the speech is relaxed and conversational, with plain words like "house," "love," "pond" and "sent." Some rhymes are loose, as in "ash-trees" with "goldfinches," and that looseness keeps the poem from sounding too polished. The last word, "fate," rhymes with "late" and closes the poem on a note of acceptance.
The final stanza is the most careful. "Neither too late / Nor yet too early" stretches the request across a line break, as if the speaker were waiting for the right moment. "What men call content" keeps a slight distance from the word, a gentle suspicion that contentment is an overused idea. Then comes the near-repetition of "content" and "contented," which makes the wish almost circular. He asks for something to be satisfied with and for the capacity to be satisfied, and he doesn't say what the something should be.
That is why the poem matters. It looks like a pastoral wish-list but turns out to be about the psychology of wanting. It suggests that no acre, house or garden can supply happiness unless the mind meets it halfway. And it does this quietly, with humour and a few well-chosen birds.