A grown-up looks back at what amazed him as a child and finds that the list ends somewhere unexpected. Ants, clouds and birds each get a stanza of their own, and each is a classic object of childhood wonder. The last stanza says that nothing mattered more than "the daily lives of people." The central idea is a quiet reversal. What the title puts in scare quotes as "small" turns out to be the biggest thing the speaker ever admired. Wonder, the poem suggests, is not reserved for spectacular things. It can be found in the ordinary routines of other human beings.
The poem's structure carries the argument. Three stanzas repeat one frame almost word for word: "___ I have admired abound, / when I was young." Only the noun changes. The repetition works like a child's counting game, and it lulls us into expecting a fourth identical stanza with another creature or natural wonder. Instead the pattern breaks. The fourth stanza opens with "But," runs one line longer, and drops the tidy sentence for a trailing, unfinished one. The form first sets up a rhythm and then lets the real subject interrupt it.
The nouns are well chosen. Ants are tiny and close to the ground. Clouds are vast, silent and far overhead. Birds sit somewhere between, alive and moving through the air. Together they cover much of what a child can see, from the grass up to the sky. Ants also bring in the idea of daily life, since they are creatures we watch going about their business. That quietly prepares the ground for the final stanza. The speaker has always been a watcher, and "admired" suggests looking from a little distance, the way a child watches adults. People turn out to be the most absorbing creatures to watch.
The grammar is slightly unusual and worth noticing. "Ants I have admired abound" reverses the normal word order, and it pairs a present-tense verb with a past-tense frame. How can things "abound" if they belong to "when I was young"? One reading is that the admiration was so plentiful it still overflows in memory. "Abound" is also the one slightly grand word among plain, short ones, so it gives each stanza a small swell of fullness. The final stanza says "nothing I have admired more / as the daily lives of people," using "as" where we would expect "than." The wording feels a little off-balance, and it gives the sentence a hesitant, searching tone. I would not push that detail too far, but it does make the speaker sound like someone feeling for the right words.
The ellipses may matter most. The first comes after "people," and the second opens the last line: "... when I was young." The refrain has been brisk three times. Now it arrives after a pause, as if the speaker has stopped to think. That pause allows two readings. It may be a gentle, nostalgic sigh, in which case the speaker admired people most as a child and perhaps sees them differently now. Or it may be the sound of realisation, where the speaker understands in the act of speaking that ordinary lives were the real marvel all along. The poem does not choose between them, which is part of its charm.
The sound of the poem is deliberately plain. There is no end rhyme. Repetition does the work that rhyme would normally do, and the short lines of mostly one- and two-syllable words keep the voice simple and spoken. That plainness suits the message, since a poem praising ordinary life would sound false if it were ornate. The scare quotes around "Small" in the title do similar work. They make us doubt the word before we have read a line, so the poem can answer the doubt at the end.
The poem is significant because it sets its idea against a familiar assumption. Clouds and birds are the usual material of poetry, and here they are only stepping stones to something less glamorous. In a few lines it asks the reader to look again at the people around them, whose "daily lives" may deserve the attention we give to the sky.