Six lines, no punctuation, not a single capital letter, and the poem still picks a quarrel with one of our most glamorous ideas: that travel is freedom. "Wanderlust" gives us a tower, a hill, a kind of music, a sheet of paper and a man who has lost his mind in the gentlest way. It leaves us to work out how they connect.
The opening line stands alone, like a proverb: "the tower knows nothing of the hill." A tower is built and upright, while a hill is simply land. The line can be read several ways. A tower standing on a hill may be ignorant of the ground beneath it, or a tower that looks out over distances may miss what is close by. Either way, it describes a blindness that comes from one's position. Because the line is cut off from everything after it, it hangs over the poem like a second title and asks what anyone can know from where they stand. Wandering is the obvious cure for that blindness, and the rest of the poem doesn't trust the cure.
The second stanza turns to travel, and the speaker is oddly casual about it: "travel is a sort of music." That "sort of" hedges, as if the speaker doesn't quite believe the metaphor. Music sounds like praise until the next line, where the participle "counterfeiting" turns it into forgery: the music is fake money passed off as real. What it forges are "hands and discourses." Hands might mean handwriting, gestures or the labour of makers, and discourses means talk. The word has an old root in a Latin term for running to and fro, so travel is quietly hidden inside it. On this reading, a journey imitates human making and human speaking without being either. It is a lovely performance of life, put on for a passing visitor.
The third stanza is the knottiest: "not fit for paper that still word away." The grammar slips. If "still" is a verb, paper stills words, fixing and silencing them. If it is an adverb, the words are still somewhere else, out of reach. The poem doesn't let us choose, and the looseness enacts what it describes, since the experience slides off the page as we try to pin down the sentence. There is an irony too. The poem is itself words on paper, so it admits its own failure while it is being written.
The final stanza is a simile with nothing obvious to attach to: "like a man gone out / of his quiet mind." We can only guess who is being compared, the traveller or the writer who tries to record the journey. The line break matters. After "gone out" we picture a man leaving the house, or a flame snuffed, and only then does "of his quiet mind" complete the familiar phrase "out of his mind." The adjective "quiet" softens the idiom of madness into something closer to loss. The mind he has left was peaceful, and he exchanged it for noise.
That idea of quiet runs through the poem's sound. There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The rhythm comes from stanzas of one line, then two, then one, then two, like a stumbling gait, and from the contrast between plain short words ("knows nothing of the hill") and the clotted "counterfeiting hands and discourses." The nearest thing to rhyme is "hill" in the first line and "still" in the third. Because "still" sits mid-line, it works as a faint echo, and the hill and the stillness seem to be on the same side, opposed to everything in motion. Words like "gone," "out" and "away" pull the other way and make the poem's vocabulary a quarrel between staying and leaving.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much doubt it packs into so little space. It doesn't say wandering is bad, and it doesn't say home is good, since the tower's ignorance is no recommendation for staying put. It suggests that desire to travel is a restless impulse that produces imitations, music that copies life, and that language cannot hold even that. For a student, it shows how ambiguity can be the point: a sentence that refuses to settle can say more than one that explains itself.