Six short lines, and a whole life seems to have changed shape between them. The title does much of the work. "Ex-nomad" is a hyphenated, slightly awkward word, like a label on a form, and it tells us the speaker has lost something: a way of living that once defined him. The poem never says how or why. It only shows what is left, a voice that sings to itself and a road that has gone soft.
The first stanza sets up a choice. The speaker sings "rather than go home / with grief." Home is not a refuge here. It is where grief is waiting, or perhaps where he would have to carry it. Singing is the alternative, a way of staying out in the open and keeping the feeling moving instead of letting it settle indoors. The singing is also private: "to myself." There is no audience, no campfire, no fellow travellers. A nomad's song would once have belonged to a group on the move, and now it is turned inward. The loneliness is quiet but real.
The second stanza swerves into direct address. "O my war horse" is a grand, old-fashioned cry, the kind of apostrophe found in epic poetry, and it is startling after the plain first stanza. The speaker talks to an animal, or to a former self, or to the whole vanished way of life that the horse stands for. A war horse is built for difficulty, for charging and enduring. It is a strange thing to call out to in a world where, as the last two lines tell us, "the way turned / into more convenience."
That last phrase carries the poem's central idea, and it works in two ways. "The way turned" can be read as a road bending, the ordinary motion of a path. But the line break lets "turned" hang for a moment before "into" completes it, so we feel a transformation instead: the way itself became something else. The word "way" may also hint at more than a physical road, a manner of living or a path of commitment. That is an inference from the word, not something the poem insists on. Either way, what the way becomes is "more convenience," and the "more" matters. It suggests an accumulation, a steady piling-up of ease. The hard road has been smoothed over and the struggle has been engineered away. The grief the speaker will not take home may be partly grief for this: a loss that no one else would call a loss, since convenience is usually sold as a gain.
The poem's sounds support this. Almost every important word is short and blunt: *sing*, *home*, *grief*, *war*, *horse*, *way*, *turned*. These are the plain, weighty words of old verse. Then, in the final line, comes "convenience," a long, Latinate, faintly bureaucratic word that is the only abstraction in the poem. It also happens to be the longest word, and it lands at the very end. After all those stubborn monosyllables, the word sounds slick and rather empty, which is probably the point. Even the rhythm gives way. The first stanza ends on the clipped two-syllable "with grief," while the second runs on to a loose six-syllable line, as though the verse itself had become easier and softer.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre, but the poem is not without music. "War horse" and "more" echo each other across the break between lines, and the open "o" sound runs through "go," "home," "o" and "more," giving the poem a faint, mournful hum. The lines are short enough that each one lands like a separate breath, and the white space around them suggests silence, the kind a lone traveller hears.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so small a space. It manages to be an elegy without naming the dead, and a criticism of modern comfort without a single argument. It leaves us with an uncomfortable question: if the difficult road is gone, and the war horse has nothing left to carry him through, where is an ex-nomad supposed to go? The speaker's answer is not to go home with grief but to keep singing, and the poem is that song.