A casual encounter with a park keeper becomes a strange meditation on what the earth is and what we do to it. The keeper's answer is a list of odd, worn-down things: shells, weather, dust, old beds. Then the speaker widens the view. The world offers a "bountiful" face, and we feel we must break it into pieces with words and blows and a touch of madness. That is how people understand and use nature, the poem suggests, even if it does damage.
The speaker tries to shrug off the guilt. If the light is good, why be unhappy? The land is so big it surely won't suffer. But the mood doesn't hold. The birds are silent, "like a hole the rain drowned," an image that feels empty and uneasy. By the end the speaker admits to hiding in sleep, a "folly" he talks himself into seeing as true. The tone is dreamy and evasive, with doubt showing through the calm.