A man with a gun goes out to hunt and finds himself hunted by a feeling. That is the small, odd drama packed into four unpunctuated lines. The speaker arrives in the country meaning to be the predator, yet the only thing that stirs is a worry: a "far-off wood / which troubles me without reason." The title gives that worry its clinical name, hylophobia, the fear of forests. The gap between that formal word and the plain, almost casual lines beneath it is where the poem lives.
The central idea, I think, is that human mastery over nature is thinner than it looks. The speaker carries a gun, the obvious emblem of power, but the poem won't let it behave like one. Look at the second line: "gun like a painted name on a picture." A painted name on a picture is a signature, the small mark an artist leaves in a corner to say *I made this*. The gun becomes a signature too, a tiny claim of ownership laid over a landscape that takes no notice of it. The simile also flattens the countryside into a painting. The speaker seems to stand outside the scene, looking at it as something framed, and that distance may be part of his trouble. He has come to the country, but what he describes is a picture with a wood in it.
The grammar is loose in ways that reward attention. With no punctuation, "hunt" and "gun" sit across a line break and nearly fuse into one phrase, as if the activity and its tool were the same thing. Then the sentence slides on: "with a far-off wood" can attach to the picture (a picture that includes a distant wood) or to the speaker (he is burdened with the wood). Both readings work, and the blur seems deliberate. The wood is at once a detail in the painting and something lodged in his mind.
"Far-off" matters here. Fear usually needs closeness, but this threat is distant, which fits the phrase "without reason." Nothing in the poem explains the unease. The trees do nothing but stand at the edge of the view. That restraint makes the feeling more believable, because irrational fear doesn't come with footnotes. There is an irony too, which I'd offer as an inference rather than a fact: a wood is the sort of place a hunter might expect to find his quarry, so what he came to seek lies inside the very thing he dreads.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines run to roughly eight, ten, five, then eight syllables. The third line, "with a far-off wood," is the shortest, so the wood is small and isolated on the page, just as it is in the scene. The sound patterns do quiet work. The first half is full of blunt short *u* sounds: "come," "country," "hunt," "gun," and finally "troubles." They give the opening a heavy, purposeful thud, like the hunter's own sense of himself. In the closing lines the sound softens into a hush of *w*'s: "with," "wood," "which," "without." The wood's own whispering seems to seep into the language and take over. "Troubles" is also a mild word, not "terrifies" or "haunts." The understatement is unnerving because the speaker can't even say why he is bothered.
The poem ends on "reason" with no full stop, so the thought hangs open and the fear is left unresolved.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it overturns in so little space. The hunter is usually a figure of confidence, someone who goes into nature to take something from it. Here he is an uneasy visitor whose weapon is a decorative signature and whose real adversary is a feeling he can't name. Many people go to the countryside to look at it, as if at a picture, and still feel an older, unreasoned uneasiness underneath. The poem catches that feeling without explaining it, and leaves the reader looking at the distant trees along with the speaker.