Before the poem says anything about solidarity, it shows a boy being told who he is. On a first job application form, the speaker ticks "no religion", and an older man overrules him: "'Yir a Protestant.'" The speaker answers, "'No, Ah'm no,'" and the exchange is over in two lines. The poem never explains who "he" is, but the man clearly has the authority to assign an identity, and the speaker clearly remembers it years later. What follows tests that label against the man's own life.
The test comes at his funeral, where a Catholic neighbour reveals that "year after year, / he signed Christmas cards comrade." The word carries weight. It belongs to political and working-class fellowship, not to church or sect, and it suggests the man's loyalties ran deeper than the categories he had pressed on the speaker. The poem then offers the most deflating line it could: "Things aren't always as they appear." This is a proverb, almost a cliché, and it works because Wilson lets it sit there flatly. It also rhymes with "year", one of the poem's few rhymes, so the idea clicks shut like a lid. The speaker does not gush or lecture. Quiet understatement is the poem's tone throughout.
The form matches that restraint. Four unrhymed quatrains, short lines and plain, mostly one-syllable words give the feel of a remembered conversation rather than a performance. The dialect appears only inside the man's speech and the speaker's reply, while the surrounding narration is in standard English. That is a subtle contrast: the voice of the old assumption sounds the most local and the most certain. The phrase "he told me" comes back in the third stanza ("That's another thing he told me"), which turns the man into a source of inherited knowledge. He gave the speaker a label, and he also gave him a fact about mines.
That fact supplies the title image. "Escape routes connected the pits / in case of disaster." Separate workings were joined underground so that men in one place could reach safety through another. The speaker then adds a quiet, rueful line: "Years later I see disused routes / under the fields and streets / between men." The stanza break falls in the middle of a sentence, so the sense runs on across the white space like a tunnel running on beneath the ground. "Disused" is the key word. It suggests the connections exist but have fallen out of use, and "fields and streets" suggests the divisions are visible on the surface while the links are hidden below.
Notice, too, the shift from "I see" to "imagine". The speaker does not claim the routes are open. He pictures them, which makes the ending a hope rather than a report.
That ending is the poem's most inventive moment: "lifelines buried in fists / blooming into palms." A fist is the shape of anger, defence or a closed community, and the palm is open and ready for a handshake. The word "lifelines" works twice. It can mean a rope thrown to someone in danger, which echoes the escape routes, and it also names a line on the palm, which only becomes visible when the hand unclenches. "Blooming" brings in something living and growing after all the underground darkness. Since "routes" sounds exactly like "roots", the title seems to prepare this image quietly, though that is a reading rather than something the poem states.
What makes the poem significant is how it handles a heavy subject without heaviness. The poem points toward religious and social division but offers no speech about it. It gives one filled-in form, one funeral remark and one fact about mines, and lets them add up. It also treats goodness as something often discovered late and indirectly, through what other people tell us after someone has gone. The man who said "Yir a Protestant" turns out to have been more than the label, and the poem's last move is to wonder whether everyone else is too, with the connections still there under the ground, waiting for a hand to open.