Nobody wanders the way the speaker of this poem asks to. "Wander me lonely" bends ordinary grammar: wandering is something we do, not something done to us, yet here the verb is an order given to an unnamed force, with the speaker as its object. The next two lines name that force, "last chance / wind", and everything that follows happens under its authority. The poem is a short plea to be carried, scattered and finally brought back, not to a house or a person but to a leaning tree.
The central idea seems to be that the wind shapes everything in the poem, and the speaker chooses to be shaped along with it. The wind makes the wanderer, scatters the thistle and, we can infer, bends the tree. "Last chance" can be read two ways: as a final opportunity, or as the last gusts of a season. The poem never decides between them, and the doubt keeps the opening tense. Loneliness is accepted here, not cured. The speaker asks for no company, only for some kind of knowing.
The thistle is the poem's most telling image. A thistle is prickly and tough, and by the time it has "faded" it is giving its seeds to the air. The speaker asks for only "half" of it, a request for less than a whole thing, and for something already past its best. The line breaks act out that modesty. After "give me half," the next line gives us "the faded," and only then does "thistle" arrive, so we receive half a phrase before the whole. Then comes "blown where scattered," a compressed, slightly looping phrase. Read one way, the seed is blown to the very place where it was scattered, so that scattering and returning begin to look like the same movement. That is an interpretation, but the wording invites it.
"To know / return" is the poem's strangest moment. There is no "the" and no "to": the speaker doesn't ask to return but to *know return*, as if it were a condition or a feeling that could be learned. The word sits alone on its line, a small pause before the final movement. The poem then refuses a straight path home. The speaker does not arrive but will "gently / circle". Return, in this poem, is a circling, and "gently" is the only soft adverb in a text otherwise made of hard, bare words.
The ending is a puzzle worth lingering over. In "a tree / its leaning," the last phrase can describe the tree's own lean, or the way the speaker circles in its manner. Either way the tree stands as the wind's handwriting, a shape made by pressure that has survived it. By circling it, the speaker honors a fellow survivor of the same weather.
The form carries the same restraint. There is no punctuation, no capital letters and no rhyme, and no line is longer than five syllables. With so little to hold the lines together, the reader has to supply the pauses, and the poem moves in gusts, with single words like "wind," "thistle" and "return" left standing on their own lines. The sound is soft: *l* runs through "lonely," "last," "gently," "circle" and "leaning," so that the first and last words of the poem share a liquid note, while the *w* of "wander" and "wind" gives the opening a breathy push. The final word, "leaning," ends in *-ing* and has no full stop after it, so the poem finishes mid-motion, as if the circling goes on after the page ends.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. Its odd grammar makes surrender feel physical. Its small requests, for half a thistle and a gentle circle, suggest a dignity that does not need rescue. It also gives a quiet, unsentimental idea of coming back: not an arrival that fixes everything, but a slow turning around something that has been bent by the same wind and is still standing.