"Richer Loam" begins by taking a familiar fact and sharpening it into an accusation. "Everyman dies every day / Impure of heart for purchased gold": the compression of "Everyman" into a single word turns the old morality-play figure into a bargain-bin allegory, and the line suggests that dying is not a final event but a daily habit, a slow spending of the self. The man in this poem has traded his heart for money, and the rest of the text counts the cost. Yet it ends with an unexpected reversal, in which even a wasted life becomes the ground for something living.
The imagery is built around a tension between coins and soil. In the first stanza, the dead man has "two crusted pennies on his eyes," the old custom of weighting the eyelids shut, and the poem greets this with bitter irony: "A smitch of comfort in the cold!" The word "smitch" (a tiny bit, a speck) is perfectly chosen, since the comfort offered is as small and cheap as the coins themselves. Money paid for his soul has dwindled to a pair of corroded discs. The second stanza turns downward into the earth. "Imparadised in clay" is a strange, almost sarcastic phrase: paradise, the word we associate with reward, is here the grave, and the dead man's heaven is dirt. He "yields compost measured to his size," a line that cuts him down to a precise and unglamorous quantity. Death is a kind of accounting, and the ledger balances in mulch.
That financial language runs through the whole poem. The man "sold" his "once-wild heart" for "cumbered coin he can't assay"; to assay is to test the worth of a metal, so he is stuck with currency whose value he never checked. "Cumbered" suggests burdened or encumbered, so the money weighs him down rather than lifting him up. He "staked" his trade "on loaded dice," meaning the game was rigged from the start, and the result "flung mortal dreams a world away." The gambling metaphor makes his loss both his fault and a kind of fraud perpetrated on him. Notice, too, the word "wild" attached to the heart. Against the tamed, counted, coined life, wildness is what was surrendered, and it is exactly wildness that returns in the green.
The poem's form enacts this return. For most of its length it runs in tight, interlocking rhymes, with the sounds of "gold," "cold," "mould" and "sold" recurring like a refrain of loss, and "clay," "assay," "away" echoing alongside them. The lines are chiefly iambic and steady, a measured, almost mercantile rhythm. Then, in the last two lines, the pattern breaks free. The closing couplet, "Yet from him in his wintering, / The tiniest of grasses spring!", is shorter, lighter, and rhymed on its own. It arrives like the thing it describes: a small, sudden shoot through a crust of frost. Even earlier, in the second stanza, the verse anticipates this with "sudden green outbreaks the mould / In rough unhindered enterprise." Here the commercial vocabulary is reclaimed, since "enterprise" is a business word, but now it describes nature's uncalculated, unpaid growth. The grass does what the man could not: it works without a profit motive.
That is the poem's central idea, and also what makes it worth reading closely. It does not let greed off the hook, because the man's choice was real and his loss is real. But it refuses to end in despair. The title, "Richer Loam," holds the paradox: his body, in dying, enriches the soil, so the heart he sold cheaply becomes valuable in a way coin never was. The word "wintering" matters here too, because winter implies a season that passes. There is no sentimentality in this consolation, though, and the dead man gets no credit for the grass. It simply happens, "unhindered," as a fact of the world. The poem suggests that life outlasts our worst bargains, and that what we waste still feeds something beyond us. That blend of moral severity and quiet hope is the poem's real strength.