Hunt turns death from a cliff-edge into a road, and the whole poem grows from that choice. A road is something other people have already walked, and that is his argument. "Death is a road our dearest friends have gone." If our loved ones are the leaders, the opening couplet asks, why hesitate to say "Lead on"? The question is gently cheeky. It treats dying as following a friend who knows the way.
The middle of the poem reads like a roll-call. "Mothers have passed it: fathers, children; men / Whose like we look not to behold again; / Women that smiled away their loving breath." The colon and semicolons set the names down like footsteps. The most striking phrase is "smiled away," which makes dying sound less like a struggle than a last act of kindness. The sentence relaxes into "Soft is the travelling on the road to death!", where the soft *s* sounds do the comforting. The exclamation mark reads more like a sigh of relief than a shout.
Hunt does not pretend that death looks inviting from the near side. The gate "repels, lest it too soon be tried," so its forbidding look is almost a safety measure that stops us rushing through early. On the far side it "turns in balm on the immortal side." The verb carries two meanings at once. A gate turns on its hinges, and here it also turns *into* balm, a soothing ointment. The line is compressed enough that a reader has to pause and assemble it, but the idea is clear: the harshness belongs only to the entrance.
The form suits this steady message. The poem is built from rhymed couplets in mostly regular ten-syllable lines, with a pace close to walking: *gone/on*, *tried/side*, *men/again*, *breath/death*. Most couplets are self-contained, each a small settled thought, which adds to the calm. The rhyme of "breath" with "death" is the plainest in the poem, and it is placed right after the dying women, where it sounds least threatening.
Then comes a turn. "But guilt has passed it? men not fit to die?" The speaker raises the objection a more severe moralist would raise, and instead of arguing he silences it: "O, hush -- for He that made us all is by!" The dash and the interjection drop the voice to a whisper, as in a sickroom or a church. "Is by" means "is nearby," so God becomes a listener standing in the room. The poem never denies guilt. It declines to turn the road into a courtroom, since nobody has the right to rule on another person's fitness while their maker is within earshot.
The ending breaks the pattern. Where a couplet is expected, Hunt gives a triplet of double rhymes: "mothers," "others," "brothers." The last line stretches beyond the rest, as if the poem cannot stop itself adding one more thing. "Mothers" also returns from the roll-call, so the poem closes where its list began: the dead and the living share the same origin. "Human we're all -- all men, all born of mothers" hammers on "all," and "All our own selves in the worn-out shape of others" suggests, judging by the imagery, that each of us wears a form handed down from those before us.
The final line is knotty: "Our used, and oh, be sure, not to be ill-used brothers!" "Used" seems to mean worn by life, and "ill-used" means mistreated. The syntax tangles because the speaker is pleading rather than stating, and the "oh, be sure" sounds half like a prayer. The poem ends with a request instead of a doctrine.
That is what gives it weight. Consolation poems often comfort only the deserving dead, while this one leaves no one off the road. It does so with plain words, one steady metaphor and a single sudden "hush." The slightly clumsy last line may be its most human feature, because the speaker's feeling outruns his meter.