An old man talks to his walking stick, and from that small, humble address a whole life comes into view. "The Lament of Llywarch Hen" gives voice to Llywarch Hen, a figure from early Welsh tradition (the name means "Llywarch the Old"), and lets him do what the poem's title promises: grieve. The central idea is simple and hard. Age strips a person of everything that made life worth living — strength, company, love, children — and leaves only the weight of memory. The final stanza says it outright: Llywarch has carried "grief and labor" as an heirloom "from the hour he left the womb."
The poem is built on repetition, and the repetition is where its feeling lives. Two refrains alternate through the stanzas. One begins "Wooden staff," a direct address to the only companion the old man has left, and it always brings a present loss: autumn arrives, no girl lies beside him, his bed is hard, his sons are dead. The other begins "Ere my back was bent," and always answers with a former glory: leading men in war, drinking with cheerful comrades, riding bay stallions beside his sons. So the poem swings like a pendulum between *then* and *now*, and the gap grows wider each time. The staff is a clever choice of listener. It is a prop of age, something he leans on, so each time he calls to it we are reminded of the bent back that makes it necessary.
The rhyme scheme is unusual and deliberately tight. Within each four-line stanza, the lines rhyme in a pattern that clings to a single sound, and Humphries often uses slant or echoing rhymes, matching words such as "autumn" and "dumb," "led" and "ended," "no" and "pillow." The sounds repeat insistently without ever quite resolving, which suits a mind that circles the same sorrows. The lines are short, mostly seven syllables, with a heavy, clipped beat that sounds almost like a stick tapping on the ground. Nothing here flows or drifts; each line lands and waits.
The imagery draws its power from the natural world. The poem opens with "the fall of leaf, autumn" and "Bracken reddens," and later "Stubble pales; birds fly southward." The seasons are used as a language for decline, so that Llywarch's old age is not just his own misfortune but part of a cooling, emptying landscape. Even the men's praise has gone quiet: "all those men / Who praised Llywarch Hen are dumb." The colour red appears twice, first as the bracken in autumn, then as the "bright red" of the first blood his spear once drew, a quiet link between a dying year and a violent youth. Once the spear was "straight and tough"; now the straight thing in his hand is a stick to lean on.
The most devastating moment comes with the sons. For several stanzas the losses are general, but in "when Llawr and Gwen / Fell in fight, I was broken," the poem names them, and the word "broken" lands harder because the old man has been so measured up to that point. After this, the cold hearth and barren field are not mere scenery; they belong to "all sonless older men." The poem widens briefly from one person to a whole category of the bereaved.
The language of the last stanzas turns bleak and physical. He is "carrion," a dead thing still walking, trapped in a "wilderness or cage." That pairing is telling: wilderness suggests exposure and abandonment, cage suggests confinement, and the old man feels both at once.
What makes the poem significant is how it keeps the voice of a very old tradition while sounding immediate and plain. Humphries writes in short, almost proverbial lines, and the effect is of grief stripped to its bones. Nothing is explained or consoled. The poem simply lets an old man say, again and again, what he has lost, and in doing so it makes a distant figure feel painfully close to anyone who has ever outlived what they loved.