Rolfe Humphries gives his poem a title that admits its debt: a "variation on a theme" borrows a melody and plays it again in a new key. The theme comes from Francis Kilvert, and the poem seems to be about a Welsh tradition, the old harpers, who are fading from the landscape. Without making a fuss, it turns that fading into praise. These are men who have outlasted kings' counsellors, who live outside the world of commerce, and who carry beauty into places no road reaches.
The opening stanza sounds like a proverb, or a riddle. "The Welsh harp has no silver string, / And it is played on the left shoulder." Both statements are put flatly, as facts, and the poem never explains them. That matters: the speaker talks like someone passing on lore, the way such knowledge actually travels. Then comes a small joke with an edge to it: "the harpers all are older / Than the counsellors of the king." Age is turned into authority. The harpers outrank the court's advisers simply by having been there longer, which quietly suggests that art outlasts politics.
The second stanza shifts from lore to elegy, and the form shifts with it. The lines grow short, and the rhymes thin out. "They are becoming rare, / Those gray and bearded men / With young hands and long fingers." That last line is the poem's most striking image. The men are old, but their hands are not, as though the music keeps them young where it matters. The stanza has an odd shape, with an unrhymed final line, as if it trails off. That wobble mirrors the subject: a tradition shrinking toward its last practitioners.
The central picture is the harper "remote from all known ways / Save those that music clears / Through ash and sycamore." This is the poem's cleverest turn. The harper's house has no road, but the music opens a path of its own through the trees. Sound becomes a kind of trail, and the listener follows it to a door. "Clears" does double duty, meaning both to open a way and to make something audible and clean. The sibilance in "Save those that music clears" even hushes the line, as if the woods were listening. The place names, "glade or coombe or glen," are loose and rolling, and they give the poem a Welsh-borderland feel without pinning it to any one spot.
Rhythm and sound are quietly traditional. The poem leans on short lines, often three or four stresses, and on rhyme that comes and goes: "string"/"king," "rare"/"there," "ways"/"plays." The rhymes feel like half-remembered refrain, as in a ballad, which suits a poem about folk music. Notice, too, how the line "Most beautiful old airs" is gentle and open. "Airs" means melodies, but it also carries the sense of something breathed and weightless, and the poem lets the word stand without elaboration.
The last stanza brings in the harpers' poverty and their reputation. "They are poor of purse; they rise / May mornings, very early, / And tradesmen think they are surly." Here the poem sets two value systems side by side. The tradesmen, who measure people by transactions, read the harpers as unfriendly. But the final lines overturn that verdict: "the wrinkled eyes / Scored by their years of smiling." The word "scored" is a lovely pun, since it means both etched like lines in a face and written like musical notation. The harpers' faces are scores, records of a lifetime of quiet joy. The poem ends on "smiling," a participle that leaves the action open and unfinished, as though the smiling is still going on.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It never scolds modern life or sentimentalizes the past. It simply notes, with precise and affectionate details, that something valuable is leaving the world, and that it remains, for now, a few steps off the road, waiting to be heard.