Six short lines, and half the work is done by the title. "Succession" is the ecologist's word for what happens when farmland is left alone: grasses give way to shrubs, shrubs to saplings, saplings to woodland, each stage making room for the next. The opening phrase, "old field," comes from the same vocabulary, since it is what such ground is called once the plough has stopped. So the poem's subject is a patch of land in the middle of changing. Its central idea is a quiet argument about what counts as order. "Succession" means a sequence, an orderly following-on, yet the speaker says the land is "out / of order."
That tension sits in the second line, and the word choice is odd enough to linger over. "Tangier" is a comparative with nothing to compare itself to. It sounds like "tangled" and like "tangy," so the field is snarled and sharp-flavoured at once. Tangier than what? The poem never says, and the reader supplies the answer: tidier ground, tended and mown. The line break matters too. For a beat the land is simply "out," excluded and out in the open, before "of order" completes the phrase. The small word "there" keeps the speaker at a distance, pointing across at the field and not standing in it.
The third line, "a place never likely to thin," shifts from "land" to "place." Land is property, something measured and farmed, while a place has a character of its own. "Thin" can mean what woods do when they open up, what a gardener does to seedlings to impose order, or what poor soil is. The hedge "never likely" is revealing. The voice is that of someone estimating what the field will do, not issuing a verdict. It is also a sound effect. The line runs smoothly through unstressed syllables ("a place never likely to") and then stops on "thin," a word that is itself narrow and brief.
The ending is where the poem becomes most open. "All gone off / and up" can be read several ways. "Gone off" can mean departed, or spoiled like milk, or set off like an alarm. "Up" suggests growth, with the field's open space rising into brush and young trees. Judging by the imagery, the field has not vanished. It has changed direction and now grows vertically. The word "all" is sweeping, as if nothing of the old open ground has been left behind. A second suggestion, which is only an inference from the title, is that "succession" also means one generation replacing another, so the departure might hint at the people who once worked the land. The poem leaves that possibility unspoken.
Form does quiet work here. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters. The rhythm is that of plain speech noticing something, and the stanzas run one line, two, one, two. Counting syllables, the lines run roughly 2, 8, 4, 8, 3, 2. They swell in the middle and then shrink to almost nothing, so the poem thins out even as it insists the place never will. It ends on the smallest word available, "up," and without a full stop, as though the sentence were still growing. That suits a subject that never reaches a finished state.
The poem does not name a single plant, animal or person. Words like "land" and "place" stay deliberately general, which lets the reader picture whatever overgrown lot or pasture they know. There is no nostalgia either. An abandoned field could easily be an elegy for lost labour, but this speaker never mourns. "Out of order" may be a human judgement, and the title hints at a different order running underneath it, slower and larger than a farmer's rows.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. In a handful of words it changes how you look at something ordinary, a messy verge or a weedy corner. What looks like neglect becomes activity, and the "disorder" is the visible surface of a process with its own sequence. The poem asks you to stand at a distance, look at the tangle, and wonder whether it is the field or your idea of order that is out of place.