Edward Thomas opens by listing what he is not. He was never apprenticed, never lived in "famous Lincolnshire", never took up poaching. Yet the whole poem hangs on a Lincolnshire poaching song. The speaker's phrase "the Lincolnshire song" points to a traditional ballad, and his first line plays against that ballad's opening. It is like someone holding up a borrowed coat, admitting it isn't his, and then spending six stanzas showing how well it fits.
The poem is about what happens to a scrap of song over a lifetime. At first it belongs to a trespasser's adventures: roaming where "nobody had a right but keepers and squires", hunting "nests, wild flowers, oak sticks, and moles", running from farmers. Later come walks "with friend or dear, / Or solitary musing". Then comes a quiet admission of loss. He has "thrown away a chance to fight a gamekeeper", trespasses less, and sees and hears "mostly from the road or path by day". The wildness has faded, but the song hasn't. Its meaning has widened to cover anything he feels. When the moon shone clear, he says, he had "no joy or sorrow that could not be expressed" by the refrain. In the fifth stanza contentment, vague longing ("I sigh for I know not what") and fear all get the same words. The best word there is "just": it is "a strange kind of delight to sing or whistle just" the refrain. The lyrics hardly matter. The tune and the habit do the work.
The structure acts this out. Each of the six stanzas has four long lines, so long that they fold over on the page, and each ends with the refrain, barely changed. The rhyme is just as insistent. "Year" closes every stanza, and most of the other rhymes fall into the same ear-sound: *there, near, dear, clear, hear, fear, anywhere, care, air*. It sounds like a tune that won't leave your head. The loosest fit is "gamekeeper" in the fourth stanza, a near-rhyme that comes just as the speaker admits his nerve has slipped.
The third line of each stanza is the odd one out, unrhymed, and it is where the thought turns. Read in order, those end-words go *find, song, expressed, sing, just, heart*. They move from searching, to the song, to speaking, to singing, to the heart where the poem ends. The long, loose lines have a walking swing and a chatty, ballad-like tone ("as you shall quickly find"). They let the speaker sound like a man talking to us on the road.
The imagery shrinks as the poem goes on. The early stanzas are crowded with concrete, almost boyish things: nests, oak sticks, moles. Later the world narrows to a road, a path, a room. The last stanza has "no one by to care" and a song that works "indoors, or out on shiny nights or dark in open air". The refrain promises a moonlit night, but by now it has come loose from actual weather and can be sung anywhere. "Shiny" is a homely, unshowy word. It keeps the song small and human rather than grandly poetic.
The ending is carefully modest. The speaker is "for a moment made a man that sings out of his heart". "Made" matters, because the song shapes him rather than the other way round. "For a moment" matters too. He claims no lasting transformation, only a brief return to something whole and unselfconscious.
What makes the poem worth reading is how honestly it treats borrowed words. The speaker doesn't claim the song as his own, and he never pretends to be the poacher of the original. Yet by repeating it through changing moods and years, he makes it his. The poem suggests that when we can't find words of our own for what we feel, an old tune handed down to us can say it for us. It also quietly mourns the freer self who first heard that tune. In the last stanza the song carries that younger self along with the older man who sings it.