A man looks out of his window on a misty morning and sees trees swaying like seaweed, and out of that small, ordinary sight Rolfe Humphries builds a meditation on how little time a life contains. The poem moves from observation to arithmetic to something close to a groan, and its central idea is quietly devastating: even a life full of love, even a life where every leaf became a lover, would not be enough to satisfy the appetite for living, because that appetite outlasts the years given to feed it.
The opening simile does a great deal of work in four short lines. Trees are not usually compared to seaweed; the comparison turns the morning air into water and the window into the glass of an aquarium. Everything is slow, swaying, submerged. The trees are called "uneventful," a flat, almost bored word, and the boredom matters. Nothing is happening outside. The drama is entirely internal, and the speaker's calm watching is what lets the dread creep in. The "mist of the morning" blurs the scene further, so that the world looks dreamlike and the speaker looks half-awake.
Then comes the poem's boldest move, in the middle stanza: a thought experiment. Count the leaves, multiply by "the number of seasons left me," and imagine each leaf as "a love." The phrasing is wonderfully lopsided. The speaker does not know the number of seasons left, only that it is limited, and that unknown quantity hangs over the whole sum. A tree has thousands of leaves, so the product would be enormous, a staggering fantasy of abundance. Yet the verdict comes in a flat, understated line: "There would still not be enough / To have before I die." The word "have" is worth pausing on. It is greedy and plain, not elevated or philosophical. The speaker is not asking for wisdom or peace but simply for more experience, more loving, more of it. The honesty of that hunger is what gives the poem its force.
The shape of the poem supports this feeling. There is no regular rhyme scheme and the lines are short and uneven, so the poem has the loose, thinking-aloud rhythm of someone talking to himself. The one place where sound tightens is the final stanza, which suddenly chimes: "stuff," "find," "mind," "sills," "cells," "morning." The echo of "stubborn stuff" with "enough" from the previous stanza ties the realization to the complaint. The final stanza also returns to the first stanza's closing words, "the morning," so that the poem ends where it began, but the morning is no longer only misty and pleasant. It has become something to wake up to, with effort.
That last image is the most compressed and the strangest. The "cells of the mind" suggests both the small chambers of a brain and the cells of a prison or monastery, and "the sills of the morning" pictures the day as a window ledge where thoughts are perched. What the speaker wakes to find there is "stubborn stuff": the mind's stubborn refusal to accept limits. The exclamation "Ah" is the only moment of open feeling in the poem, half sigh, half wince, and it arrives after all the coolly reasoned counting has failed to settle anything.
What makes the poem worth reading is the gap between its modest scale and its large subject. It is short, plain in diction, and built from a single window and a single morning, yet it manages to say something that most people feel and few state so cleanly: that mortality is not only fear of an ending but a kind of unfinished appetite. The title's note that this is an "air, from the Old Welsh" suggests a song-like, borrowed form, and the poem does carry a lyrical, almost sung quality despite its irregularity. The tone is neither self-pitying nor grand. It simply notes the arithmetic of a life, finds it short, and lets the leaves go on moving.