A cellar without a house is a strange thing to meet in the woods, and the poem opens with that slight surprise. "A cellar in the wood" is flat and almost offhand, as if the speaker had simply come upon it. The title supplies the term "cellar hole," the sunken square left when the rest of a building has gone, and that phrase already holds the poem's paradox. A cellar is meant to be a room, a place for storing things. A hole is the absence of one. What survives is a container with only space inside.
The first stanza is built from plain, mostly one- and two-syllable words: "wood," "kept," "while," "thorn." Its lines are short, six syllables, then four, then five, so the pace is quiet and unhurried. The phrase "kept all this while" is the hinge. "Kept" can mean preserved, guarded or simply left alone, and the sentence never says who did the keeping. The forest, the passing years and the speaker's own attention are all possible keepers, and the poem lets them overlap. The passive construction makes the place seem looked after by something nobody can name.
The firethorn adds to this. It is a thorny shrub, and its name welds together two images, fire and thorn. The thorn suggests guarding, a barrier around something vulnerable. The fire is harder to place, but it may call up the hearth that once warmed the vanished house. That is an inference, since the poem never mentions people. Still, the word sits oddly in a stanza about cold earth and a hollow in the ground, and it gives the scene a trace of heat and defence. The cellar lies "under" the plant, which makes it look sheltered or hidden, depending on how you read it.
The second stanza turns abruptly from observation to argument, and the language changes with it. Where the first stanza was earthy and Anglo-Saxon, this one is Latinate and abstract: "protest," "disquiet," "trepan," "catalogue." The lines grow longer, eight syllables and then nine, as though thought were crowding in. The simile "like a protest against disquiet" is a surprising one. A protest is loud, but a cellar hole is silent and motionless. Its stillness becomes a stand against the restlessness of a world that forgets, hurries and tears things down. The poem seems to say that simply remaining, as an absence in the ground, is a kind of resistance.
Then comes "trepan," the most striking word. To trepan is to bore a hole in the skull, an old surgical procedure for relieving pressure. The image works through a double hole. The cellar hole, itself a gap, is imagined drilling into "the general catalogue / of the lost." Pressure and "disquiet" belong together here, so the cellar hole seems to ease a mental strain. Its emptiness opens a small vent in the great list of everything that has vanished. A "catalogue" suggests an orderly inventory, a library of losses, yet the word "general" makes it vast and impersonal. Against that anonymous record, one specific hollow under one particular bush has a stubborn individuality.
The poem has no rhyme and no punctuation, and it is a single sentence spread over two stanzas. That unbroken flow carries us from the physical to the abstract without a pause, so the leap from a patch of woodland to the whole history of loss feels natural. The final line, "of the lost," is only three syllables long and ends on a stressed, closing word. After the long, crowded line before it, the poem stops short, much as a footstep might stop at the edge of a pit.
Its significance lies in how much it compresses into six lines. It is a poem about memory, but it never uses the word, and it never describes the people who once lived there. It trusts a single object to stand for what has gone. The poem also gives a quiet answer to a familiar question, what remains when everything made has fallen. Here the answer is a shape, an absence that still holds its form and still has some power to unsettle us.