Between one storm and the next, a walker pauses to look at a hillside wood and a woodman's cottage. Nothing happens in "Interval". The day's wildness is over, a wilder night is coming, and in the gap the speaker notices that the cottage is untroubled by any of it. The poem's quiet turn comes in its last two stanzas, where that steady building is set against a human life that will "roam, / Die, and forget" the very scene being described.
The title is the first clue. An interval is a pause, not a resolution, and the opening stanza makes that plain. "Gone the wild day" begins with the loss, and the next line promises "a wilder night." Even the light is rationed: "brief twilight." The wet road climbing into the beech wood "shines almost", a typically careful phrase. The poem will not claim a full gleam, only the near-miss of one, and that restraint governs its whole tone.
The form is just as disciplined. There are eight quatrains of very short lines, mostly two beats each, so the poem moves in small, held breaths. The rhyme scheme is a tidy abab, but some of the rhymes are not quite exact. "Road" and "beech-wood" only half-rhyme, as do "unwavering" and "wing", "gloom" and "roam", and "trees" and "peace". The effect is a pattern that clicks shut without ever feeling entirely settled, which suits a calm that is really a lull.
The imagery runs on paradox and gentle personification. The beeches keep "a stormy rest" and breathe "deep / Of wind from the west", like sleepers or animals at ease in rough weather. The wood is black with "a misty steam", and the clouds break "for one gleam." The cottage gets the most vivid treatment. It "hunches soft / Under storm's wing", as if it were a bird sheltering under a larger bird, and it "awakens not / To light or breeze." Its smoke rises "unwavering", the longest, steadiest word in the poem, in a landscape where everything else is blown about. The cottage is not heroic. It simply sits there.
Only in the seventh stanza does the speaker appear, and the sudden "I" lands hard. The cottage "has no care / For gleam or gloom", and the plain, flat phrase "It stays there" sets itself against "while I shall roam." The sentence then drops three verbs in a row, "roam, / Die, and forget", with "Die" placed bluntly at the start of a line. The final stanza gathers up the poem's own scenery, "The hill of trees, / The gleam, the wet", and files it under things to be forgotten. Those images were what the poem had just spent seven stanzas noticing. The closing phrase, "this roaring peace", compresses the earlier "stormy rest" into one oxymoron. Peace and violence were never separate here. They sit inside the same moment.
What stops this from being a simple lament is its tone. The speaker does not envy the cottage outright, and he does not pity himself. The cottage's indifference is a kind of steadiness, but it also means the building will never notice the beauty it sits in. The walker will pass, but at least he sees it. The poem is made of the attention that will later be lost, and it leaves open whether that attention is a consolation or just a poignant fact.
Readers who know that Edward Thomas was killed in the First World War in 1917 may hear the word "Die" with added weight. The poem does not need that knowledge, though, and nothing in the text points to a battlefield. The mortality it describes is ordinary and universal. Its achievement is to place a whole view of human transience inside a few dozen short lines, using a wet road, a smoking chimney and a gap in the clouds, and to do it without raising its voice.