The poem is a list of four places, each starting with "where" and none of them finishing a sentence. We never learn the main clause, so the lines feel like fragments of memory or a map with the labels left in but the destination missing. That gap is part of the effect: the reader is left hanging, much like the people in the poem.
What we do get is a picture of scraping by. There's "some hope of getting money," which is hedged and thin. There are stairs that "would not end," which suggests tiring, maybe hopeless effort. Then the group "enter the hill," an odd, slightly ominous image that could mean a mine or a hillside settlement, though the poem doesn't say. The last line is the most human: "my wife hunts for bread," where the plain verb makes the search for food feel urgent.
The speaker sounds weary and quietly worried, not angry. The title, "Sweet By-and-By," sounds like a hymn about a better life to come, and set against these lines it reads as bitterly ironic. The mood is bleak, patient, and a little numb.