Four short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and still the poem manages a reversal. It begins in calm preference and ends in something closer to confession. The title, "Abandoned pasture," sets the scene: a field that livestock have left. The first line, "a field for cranes," offers what the speaker would like to see there instead. I read the cranes as birds, long-legged and wild, though the poem never says so outright. What the speaker wants is a place left to wild things, with no animals put there to be used.
The second and third lines turn on the thing being rejected, "that ugliest beast / the soldier-like herd." The disgust is strong. "Ugliest" is a superlative, and "beast" is a blunt, heavy word. The pointing "that" makes the herd sound like something the speaker would rather not look at. Then comes "soldier-like," a hyphenated compound that does a lot of work. A herd is already a crowd that moves together, but comparing it to soldiers adds uniformity, obedience and a suggestion of marching in step. The ugliness the speaker sees is less about bodies than about sameness, individuals dissolved into a mass. The poem never says whether the herd is cattle, sheep or something else, and that vagueness lets "herd" reach beyond the farmyard.
Then the last line undercuts everything before it: "whose face I have." Up to this point the speaker has stood outside the scene, choosing between cranes and cattle with a clear preference. Now the speaker admits to sharing a face with the thing despised. The line is also grammatically open. It could mean "I have the face of this herd," a confession of kinship. It could also be an unfinished thought, as if the speaker were about to say "whose face I have seen" or "whose face I have come to know." The poem does not choose. Judging by the text alone, the more striking reading is the first, in which the speaker's contempt turns back on himself. Whichever reading we take, the line stops short, and the white space after it leaves the sentence hanging.
The sound of the poem supports this turn. The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are four syllables, then eight, then five, then four, so the second line swells with the speaker's revulsion and the last contracts into something small and withdrawn. Within that irregularity there are quiet echoes. "Cranes" and "face" share the same long vowel, so the first image and the last are linked by sound. That link fits the poem's logic: the speaker would like to belong with the graceful bird, yet the face belongs to the herd. The hard consonants of "beast" and "herd" are heavy and blunt, while "cranes" is lighter, with a long, open vowel. Even at this scale, the sounds sort the poem's two sides.
The poem's grammar is also worth noticing. There is no main verb to anchor the first three lines. "A field for cranes" is a fragment, almost a label or a wish, and the following lines hang from it with "instead of." Only in the final line does a verb appear, "have," and it is a verb of possession and identity, not of action. The speaker cannot act on the field. All he can do is look at it and recognize himself. The abandoned pasture of the title therefore works on two levels. It is a real empty field, and it is the space left when the speaker's contempt gives way to self-recognition.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it needs to unsettle a familiar attitude. Many people feel superior to the crowd, and the poem starts by voicing that feeling in strong terms. Then it undermines the stance in its last four words, without explanation or moralizing. The reader is left to decide how far the shared face extends: to the speaker alone, to the people who love such fields, or to everyone who has ever stood outside a herd and judged it.