Barnes builds his consolation on an "if" and then spends four stanzas quietly outgrowing it. The first stanza supposes that souls might "sheen so bright / In heaven as in e'thly light," with nothing better in store. Even then, the young who died would arrive "comely still, in sheape an' feace." It is a modest hope: heaven as a kind of preservation of what we loved. By the last stanza the modesty is gone. The dead are "feairer still to God above, / Than when they died in beauty." The poem travels from keeping beauty to bettering it, and that journey is its central idea. Early death is a loss, but it also shields beauty from what time does to it.
The middle stanzas make that claim believable by being honest. Barnes does not pretend all deaths weigh the same. Old age arrives in physical detail: cheeks "a-growen wold," a "deep'nen wrinkle's hollow vwold." When life is ripe, he says, death calls "vor less ov thought." Then comes the grief of the young person's family, and Barnes lists it by relationship: the sister, the father with "a child a-vled," the husband whose bride has "laid / Her head at rest, noo mwore to turn." That last phrase is almost unbearably gentle. The mourners hold "heads a-hung," a drooping that you can picture at once.
Stanza four opens with "An' yeet," and the mood shifts. Life carries on in the church, where prayer rises from "downcast eyes," and on the village greens "a-beat half beare" by generations of dancers. The poem sets bowed eyes beside "sparklen eyes" and does not scold the living for dancing. It treats their "bloomen cheaks" as how a community goes on, "though young ha' died." Those blooming cheeks also answer the wrinkled ones from stanza two, so youth and age stay in view together. A small detail adds to this. The word "feair" is spelled the same in "feast an' feair" (the festival) and in "The feair at death be always feair" (the beautiful). In the dancers' world and in the dead's, fairness is the thing everyone values.
The form supports the comfort. Each stanza has eight lines of light, steady iambic beats, rhymed in a pattern that runs aabbbccd. The three-line rhyme in the middle (cease / feace / pleace, or wear / ceare / feair) rolls on a little longer than a couplet would, like a lullaby that won't quite stop. Each stanza then closes on a line about "beauty," and that word never rhymes with anything. One reading is that this leaves the thought hanging, as these lives were left. The line is also shorter in effect, ending on the unstressed "-ty," so the voice drops away at the end of every stanza like a bell fading. Repeating the phrase turns it into a refrain, and each time it carries a different meaning. In stanza one it names the dead, in stanza four it sits in a concession ("though young ha' died"), and in stanza five it becomes a point of comparison that heaven surpasses.
The dialect does real work too. The softened *v* in "vor," "vall," and "vled," the *a-* prefix on "a-took" and "a-hung," and the *-en* endings of "pinen" and "tweilen" give the poem an unhurried, spoken warmth. A mourner could say these words without sounding like a preacher. The grammar is plain, and so is the argument: the dead will never "wear / Uncomely, under tweil an' ceare."
That line is also where the poem is most interesting. The comfort it offers is real, but it quietly admits something hard, which is that ordinary life wears people down. The young are spared that, yet they are also spared everything else, and the poem never quite says whether that is a fair exchange. Barnes writes in the Dorset dialect, and the poem shows what that choice can do. It takes a subject often handled in grand language and speaks it in the voice of the village, and it does not hurry the grieving toward cheerfulness.