Four short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and yet a whole way of living is sketched in them. The title does much of the work. Without "Hobo" we might take the speaker for a tired traveller or a lonely sleeper. With it, we think of freight yards, rough camps and a life lived outside the usual map of addresses. The poem never says any of this. It leaves the title to set the scene and lets the speaker talk in the flat, unbothered voice of someone listing facts.
The first line is the strangest and the most inventive: "places made of bridges and old differences." Places are not normally made of such things. A bridge is somewhere you cross, not somewhere you stay, though for a person sleeping rough it might also be a roof. Either way, this speaker's world is built from structures of passage. Then come the "old differences," a phrase deliberately left open. It could mean quarrels left behind, the gap between a wanderer and the settled people of a town, or just the ways one town differs from the next. The word "old" matters, because these differences have lost their sharpness and become building material. A place, for this speaker, is what is left over from crossings and disagreements.
The second line, "I remember them afterwards," is calm and slightly deflating. Memory arrives only once he has gone. While he is in a place he barely registers it, because he is already half on the move, and only distance lets it take shape. "Afterwards" is the quiet hinge of the poem, since everything is seen in retrospect and never in the moment.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre, but the lines shrink as they go. Counting "differences" as four syllables, they run twelve, eight, six, five. The poem narrows like someone settling down for the night, or like a life stripped of baggage. The long opening line carries a lot of freight, and the last line carries almost nothing. Sound reinforces this. The plural endings of "places," "bridges," "differences," "friends" and "afterwards" give the poem a hushed, hissing undertone, and "sleep" and "sand" continue the soft s. The nearest thing to a rhyme comes in the final stanza, where "friends" and "sand" share a closing -nd. It quietly pairs the thing he claims not to have with the thing he does.
That stanza begins with a familiar idiom, "no friends but," and gives it a bleak twist. Sleep is the one companion who reliably turns up, and perhaps the only escape. The "and" then adds sand, and the grammar treats the two as equals: an abstract state and a gritty patch of ground. The word "morning" places us at the moment of waking, when sleep has just withdrawn and the ground is cold and grainy underneath. Judging by the imagery, this might be a riverbank under one of those bridges, which would loop the ending back to the first line. There may also be a small pun. "Sleep" and "sand" are both everyday names for the crust in the corners of the eyes on waking, so the speaker's friends could be what he literally wakes up wearing.
What keeps the poem from sentimentality is its tone. There is no self-pity, no "alas," no appeal to the reader. The loneliness is delivered like an inventory, and we supply the feeling ourselves. It is also not clear that the speaker is only to be pitied. If his old differences are over and he owes nothing to anyone, the bareness of his life looks a little like freedom. The poem holds both readings without choosing, and that tension is its centre: a life of passing through can be read as deprivation or as release, and the speaker's even voice will not say which.
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. It takes a figure surrounded by romantic or pitying clichés and reduces him to plain things: bridges, sleep, sand, memory. It also quietly enacts its own subject. A poem this brief is itself an "afterwards," a place recalled in a few lines once the speaker has moved on, and what remains of any place is only what he can carry.