Nobody in this poem arrives anywhere. The speaker leaves a main route for "a little side road," and everything that follows happens inside the head. The title promises "the way home," yet home never appears in the four lines. We get a detour and a worry instead. That gap between promised destination and actual wandering is where much of the poem's meaning sits. The phrase "change onto" and the word "road" suggest driving, though the poem never says so, and a walker would fit almost as well.
The whole text is one sentence, split into two couplets, with no punctuation and no capital letters except the pronoun "I." The syntax is also slightly incomplete. We expect "doubtful *whether* what I have of night might ease my mind," but the linking word is missing, and the sentence leans forward without it. The reader has to supply the connection, which is a small version of the speaker's problem: something needed is absent, and one fills the space with guesswork. The phrase "only to keep being doubtful" works the same way. "Only to" usually signals a disappointed outcome, as in *he tried, only to fail*. So the turn onto the side road seems not to have solved anything. And "keep being" tells us the doubt was already there before the turn and has simply come along for the ride.
The most unusual phrase is "what I have of night." Night is treated as a possession, a portion that the speaker holds, like a small sum of money or the last part of a day. Judging by the wording, it may mean the stretch of darkness still left before getting home, or simply the darkness he happens to be in. Either way, the speaker has only "what" he has, not the whole of it. The choice of a side road adds to this. "Little" is a gentle, almost affectionate word, set against the large and shapeless thing called night. Presumably the quiet road is meant to calm him, and the poem hopes that darkness, which could be frightening, might be the very thing that helps.
The sound of the poem supports that hope. Its lines are short and get shorter: the first two have eight syllables each, then the second couplet shrinks to five and four. The poem narrows as it goes, much as a side road narrows. There is no end-rhyme, but a quiet echo runs across a line break: "night" closes one line and "might" opens the next. This is a rhyme the ear catches almost by accident, and it joins the thing the speaker has (night) to the thing he hopes for (a "might"). The long *i* sound also keeps returning: "I," "side," "night," "might," "my," "mind." Because that vowel is so closely tied to the speaker and his surroundings, the poem sounds closed in on itself, a mind talking quietly in the dark.
Two words hold the poem's uncertainty in place: "doubtful" and "might." The first names the problem and the second names the cure, but "might" is only a possibility. The poem does not tell us whether the night eases anything, and it ends on "mind" without any sense of relief. A softer poem would have let the road deliver a calm moment, but this one stops before that point. The title adds a final turn. If the way home is the whole journey, then doubt is part of the route, and the side road may be less a shortcut than a different way of carrying the same thought. That is a reading rather than a certainty, and the poem leaves room for it.
The poem is significant because it manages a lot with very little. It uses plain words and ordinary movement, with no large metaphor, and it still captures a familiar feeling: changing your surroundings in the hope of changing your mood, then finding that the mood has come with you. It also does not pretend to a consolation it hasn't earned. For students, it shows that a poem can be tiny and still be carefully built, with its sound, syntax and line lengths all supporting the idea. It also shows how an honest "might" can say more than a confident promise.