Every stanza of Barnes's poem opens with the same small word, "Since", and the word works like a legal argument. Since she is gone from the stairs, the walks, the dinner table and the evening prayers, the speaker will go somewhere she never was. The poem is built on a quiet paradox. He hopes that grief, which clings to shared places, might loosen its grip on ground with no memories in it. By the end, the poem has shown that this cannot work, and that only one place can answer his loss: the one where she has already gone.
The losses are chosen with care. First comes her face, "up steairs or down below", then her company on summer walks, then her voice beside his "dinner-bwoard", and finally her voice joined with his in prayer. Each is an ordinary domestic ritual, and together they sketch a whole day, from the house to the open air, the meal and the evening. They also move steadily inward, from seeing someone to sharing a silence with them to sharing faith. Barnes never describes the wife herself, only the gaps she has left in these habits, and that makes the absence feel lived-in.
The second half of each stanza is a near-refrain: "Below the … bough, my love, / Where you did never come." What changes is the verb. At home, he says, "I do look" for her, meaning he keeps glancing up expecting to find her. In the next stanza this becomes "I do grieve", and in the third he does "pine". The feeling sharpens from habit to sorrow to wasting longing, even as he insists he does not grieve out in the trees. The poem undercuts its own speaker. A man who truly felt better in the wet woods would not need three stanzas to explain it.
The settings darken as he goes. First there is the "flat-bough'd beech", a sheltering, roof-like tree. Then comes a mist that "do ride / Drough trees a-drippen wet", with the dripping branches almost weeping for him. By the third stanza the bough is "darksome", and he eats whatever he "can avword" in an open field. The cold, damp walks set themselves against the memory of "zummer het" with her at his side. The dialect also does real work. The z's and v's ("zide", "vaice", "vield") give the lines a soft, humming sound, and the habitual "do" ("I do look", "I do grieve") makes his sorrow sound like a daily routine rather than a single event. Even the title, "a-Lost", uses the same participle form and presents the loss as a state he lives in rather than a moment that passed.
The form is plain and song-like. Long lines of four beats alternate with short lines of three, in the rhythm of a ballad or hymn. The short lines in the second half click shut on paired rhymes such as "come" and "hwome", or "dine" and "pine". Those rhymes, together with the repeated phrases, give each stanza a settled, almost liturgical feel, so that the break in the last stanza stands out.
That stanza turns the poem upside down. "Below the bough" becomes "Above the tree an' bough", and the speaker's gaze lifts from the wet ground to heaven. The phrase "where you did never come" returns as "where you be gone avore", so that the one place she has never been is replaced by the place where she is. He is no longer praying alone for comfort, but with "woone sad vaice", a single voice where there were once two, asking for "greace / To goo where you do bide." The last line, "To come vor evermwore", echoes the opening "noo mwore". Loss expressed as "no more" ends as "evermore", and grief ends as hope of reunion.
The poem matters because it handles bereavement without grand gestures. Barnes wrote in the speech of Dorset, and here that speech suits the subject: the voice of a man with a meal, a field and a prayer, not an elegist with a lecture. The comfort is quiet and uncertain, and it is hard to read the last line as anything other than a wish to die. The poem lets us see how love survives in routines and how a wish to escape grief can turn into a wish to follow the person who has gone.