Crying, in these lines, is less a collapse than a vehicle. "Crying might take one home with it," the poem begins, as if tears were a ride on offer, something that could carry a person back to where they started. The speaker declines. The rest of the poem is about the effort of declining: keeping on the road, keeping up appearances, and admitting at the end that the cheerfulness was forced. The central idea seems to be that travel can be a way of not feeling, and that the person who never stops moving may be the one who most needs to stop and cry.
The word that does the most work is "springs." The phrase "on new springs" can be read at least three ways. Springs are a season, so crying might bring a fresh start. They are also sources of water, which fits tears neatly. And they are the coils of a carriage or car, the part that cushions a rider over rough ground. Because the next stanza talks about driving and ruts, that mechanical meaning becomes hard to ignore. Tears become something with a suspension system, a way of travelling that is gentler than the speaker's own. The poem never picks one meaning, and the pile-up of senses suggests that grief, renewal and motion are tangled together here.
The second stanza turns to the speaker's actual route. "This journey / out-drives any ruts" is a proud claim: the trip moves too fast or too forcefully to get stuck in a habit or a low mood. Yet "out-drives" is an odd, effortful compound, and the stanza collapses straight into "but not so easy." That fragment has no subject and no verb. We can't tell whether it is the journey that isn't easy or the outrunning of the ruts, and the grammar sounds worn out in the way the speaker probably is. The earlier boast loses its confidence in the space of a line.
The last stanza then confesses the method: "I drove myself to be merry / talking of travel." "Drove" echoes "out-drives," but now the driver and the vehicle are the same person, so the speaker is both the car and the one pushing it. "Merry" is a slightly old-fashioned, festive word, and "to be merry" sounds like a task rather than a mood. The final phrase gives the game away, because the speaker is only talking of travel, not travelling. Cheerful chatter about journeys is a way to stay on the surface. The sounds support this: "talking of travel" has a light, tripping rhythm, like small talk, and it makes the poem's ending sound brisk while its meaning is sad.
The form is as spare as the voice. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, and the stanzas shrink and shift from two lines to four to three. Without full stops, the lines drift into each other, and the enjambment in "take one home with it / on new springs" leaves the reader briefly unsure where the sentence is heading, much like a traveller without a map. The pronouns also change. For two stanzas the poem uses the impersonal "one" and "any," a way of talking about feeling at arm's length. Only in the last stanza does "I" appear, and it arrives with a confession. The distance between "one" and "I" is the poem's emotional journey, and it takes just seven lines.
The title adds a final turn. "Hard" can mean difficult, but it can also mean tough or unyielding, and the poem seems to hold both: a traveller who finds the road hard and who has made himself or herself hard in order to keep going. The poem never says what the speaker is grieving, or where "home" is, and I read that silence as deliberate, since a speaker who talks only of travel would hardly explain the cause of the crying.
The poem is worth reading because it shows a familiar kind of evasion with so little. It names no wound and tells no story, yet a reader recognises the forced smile, the busy talk and the refusal to stop. By the end, the speaker's cheerfulness reads less as a victory than as a form of driving, and the road is still moving under it.