The title promises a traveller, yet the person in this poem seems to be going nowhere. All the movement lies in the final lines, where a love of the road "may come to me / and call me at home." The expected direction is reversed. The speaker doesn't set out toward the road. The wish is that the road, or at least the longing for it, will arrive at the door. Judging by the words "at home," the speaker is staying put, and that is the poem's central idea: the pull of travel can live inside a settled life and show up there like a visitor.
The poem has no punctuation and no capital letters, so its grammar floats. One reading takes "a sea for all present lives of sand" as an aside: my love of the road, which is a sea for all present lives of sand, may come to me. Another lets the line break blur things, so that the road itself becomes the sea. Without a comma to settle it, the reader has to choose, or keep both. That openness suits a poem about being unsure whether you are coming or going.
The imagery is compact and odd. A sea of sand evokes a desert, a place where dunes move like waves, so the road is imagined as something vast and shifting. The phrase "lives of sand" is the strangest. Sand is made of countless grains, each tiny, each carried about by wind and water. Lives of sand sound numerous, small and impermanent, and the road is the sea that holds them all. The word "present" probably means "current," and it keeps the focus on lives happening now. It may also faintly suggest a gift, but that is an inference, not something the poem states. Sand and sea also meet at the shore, the border between staying and leaving, which is where this speaker seems to stand.
The poem's shape is easy to miss. The lines run roughly five, nine, four and five syllables, and the long second line is where the sea opens out. Then the poem contracts into two short lines, as if the vastness has been pulled into a small room. There is no rhyme, but "road" in the first line and "home" in the last share a long *o* and bracket the poem, so the two opposites are tied together by sound. Smaller echoes help. "Love" and "lives" lean on each other, "come" and "call" share a hard *c*, and "me" appears twice in two lines. Nearly every word is a single syllable, and "present" is the only exception. The plainness gives the poem the feel of a spoken wish, not a grand statement.
The ending is where the language gets most interesting. "Call me at home" can mean several things. The road might summon the speaker, or telephone him, or even name him, calling him a person who is at home. It could also mean paying a visit, as in "calling at" a house. Next to the sea and sand, the phrase sounds almost comically domestic, like something on a business card. That contrast is part of the charm. A huge, restless longing is reduced to an ordinary household interruption.
The small word "may" matters too. The speaker doesn't say the love of the road will come, only that it might. That makes the poem hopeful but passive. The speaker waits to be found by wanderlust instead of chasing it. In that light the title becomes a puzzle. "Traveller" may name who the speaker already is at heart, or who he hopes to be once the call arrives.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so few words. It treats road and home as partners instead of opposites, and it suggests that restlessness can be a guest as well as a drive. It also shows how a poem can work through ambiguity, since missing punctuation and a double-edged phrase let one short sentence carry a sea, a desert and a knock at the door.