Nobody speaks in "Trysting" until the final stanza, and even then it is only "a call and a laugh." Mary F. C. Pratt gives us no named lovers and no conversation, only a route. Instead of describing a secret meeting, the poem describes the walk toward it and lets the countryside build the suspense. Its central idea is that anticipation can be more intense than arrival. The meeting never happens on the page. The poem stops on "a quickening heartbeat," just before it would.
Each of the four tercets moves the walker on. First comes the road and the orchard, then the path down to the river, then the bridge and the oak, and finally the village street. The journey runs from open country toward shelter and people, and the light fades along the way. The poem begins with "bright-leaved maples," passes through a "brown cow pond," and arrives at "ghost-white flowers" where moths feed, which suggests dusk. It ends in a street that is "dark, with circles of lamplight." Colour drains out of the poem as it goes. The maples and apples also suggest autumn, though the poem never names a season.
The grammar is carefully managed. The first three stanzas are lists of noun phrases, each place given a small action by a "where" clause: a girl sells apples, an otter wallows, thrushes flutter, moths sip. The world is busy and quite indifferent to the person passing through. The walker never appears and never gets a verb, so we see everything through an eye that is waiting. Notice, too, the shift from "a winding road" and "a narrow path" to "the old stone bridge" and "the village street." The definite article makes these landmarks feel familiar, as if this walk has been made before.
The final stanza drops the "where" clauses and the scenery verbs altogether, and the senses change with them. Sight dominates the first three stanzas, but in the dark we are left with hearing: a call, a laugh, the squeak of a gate, a step, a sigh. The squeak is the best detail. It is a tiny, ordinary sound that seems enormous to someone straining to listen. A lychgate is the covered entrance to a churchyard, so the meeting is set at the edge of consecrated ground. Together with the earlier "ghost-white," that may give the thrill a faintly solemn or uncanny edge, though that is an inference from the imagery.
The sound patterns tell the same story. The first stanza chimes on "maples," "apples" and "ripples," a pleasant echo that is not quite exact. The second is the tidiest, a full triple rhyme on "shallows," "willows" and "wallows," and the squelchy comedy of "wallows" shows a poem still at ease. Then the order begins to slip. "Water," "o'er" and "nectar" share little beyond an unstressed ending, and "o'er" is an old-fashioned contraction that sits a little awkwardly at the line end. By the last stanza, "lamplight," "lychgate" and "heartbeat" are held together only by their closing *t*, a small click where a full rhyme should be. The neatness of the rhyme loosens as the tension rises, as though the walker's composure were going with it.
The rhythm does something similar. The early lines have a rolling, four-beat lilt that suits an easy stroll. In the last stanza the commas chop the lines into short phrases. "A soft step, a sigh" is almost too short to walk to, and the pace falters like a held breath.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves out. Pratt never says who is meeting whom, or why it is secret, and the reader supplies the story. Because the lovers are left out, the landscape takes on their feeling. The bridge, the willows and the lamplight become stages of rising nerves. The poem also shows that a list can be dramatic, if the items are arranged so the senses sharpen and the rhymes thin out as the heart speeds up. Its last word, "heartbeat," lands where the meeting would begin.