Barton's poem is an argument disguised as a sigh. Its opening line, "How sweet to die in a small town!", sounds like a gentle wish, but what follows is a catalogue of grievances against the city. The poem sets two kinds of death side by side and asks which one honors a human life. The small town wins, and the poem takes its time, and its harshest language, to explain why.
The city section is the angriest part. Death there is processed rather than mourned, and the processing is done by indifferent people. The reporter is "unfeeling and blase," sucking "a limp and listless cigaret," a detail that makes boredom physical: even the cigarette has no energy. He "mangles" the dead person with an obituary, a verb borrowed from accidents and machinery, as though writing badly were a second kind of violence. The corpse itself is "hustled to the slab still warm," a phrase that makes haste feel almost obscene. The funeral guests are "hectic," they "dash up" and "leap from their shuddering cars," and they nearly miss the coffin sliding into the hearse. The whole scene is stripped of ceremony and reduced to a schedule. Then comes the cruelest touch: the mourners "naively ask how much you left." Grief is replaced by arithmetic, and the poem's verdict is bitter and precise: in "the great hive," where the person "was naught before," he is now "less than nothing." The beehive image is worth pausing on, since it suggests a crowd of busy creatures with no individuals in it.
Everything flips at "Not so in Portage, Boscobel or Bem." Naming actual small places gives the countryside a specificity the city never gets; the city is only "the great hive," while the villages have names, as people do. The vocabulary shifts accordingly. "Kindly neighbors reverently call," bringing "the sweeter flowers of hedge and home," in contrast to the city's "noisome lilies." The body lies "in peace" in "your own parlor," not in a morgue's silence. The dead face is "calm, upturned seraphic," so the corpse is granted a kind of angelic dignity. One of the poem's wisest touches follows: the men "revolve your frailities, in which they see / Their own reflected and condoned." Mourning here is not sentimental whitewashing. The neighbors know the dead person's faults and forgive them because they recognize themselves in them. That is a more mature idea of community than simple praise.
The burial completes the contrast. Where the city's dead vanish into a hurried slide, the small town's dead are laid "under the kindly hillside sod and clean, / Warmed with the sun and sweetened by the wind." Nature itself takes part, and the earlier "darksome silence" of the city is replaced by sun and air. Afterward the dead person's "virtues form the theme of evening talk, / And you become a legend." This is the poem's real claim about what a good death offers: not just a decent burial but a continued life in other people's stories. The city erases; the village remembers.
Formally, the poem is free verse, without regular rhyme or fixed line length, though its rhythm leans on a loose iambic pulse that gives the lines a measured, almost conversational dignity. The pulse tightens and breaks in the city passage, where lines run long and jagged, and settles in the village passage, where phrases like "warmed with the sun and sweetened by the wind" balance in pairs. The ending is the only place where rhyme appears: "How fine and deep such sleep!" closes the poem with a chiming couplet inside a single line, a small musical release after all the irregularity, and then the opening line returns, turning the poem into a circle.
What makes the piece interesting today is its refusal to be merely nostalgic. It could have been a postcard of village life, but its energy comes from anger at modern anonymity, from the feeling that a society that cannot mourn properly has lost something essential. Whether the picture of small-town life is fair is another question; the poem is an idealization, and its city is a caricature. But as an argument that how we treat the dead reveals how we value the living, it still lands.