Every journey ends somewhere, and the hardest part may be the arrival. "By This Last Fire" catches two travellers on their final night outdoors, camped before a walk into town at dawn. What the poem is really about is not the wandering itself but the dread of giving it up. The speaker already suspects that peace, the thing most people expect travel to lead to, will feel like a loss.
The poem is built like a night. It opens with fire-making, moves into a looking-back at everything the pair have seen, and closes with sleep. The first stanza is practical and sensory: "sun-dried, resinous" branches, a "tattered cloak" spread over "sweet bracken." Smoke "blows pungent incense," a small but telling choice of word. The campfire becomes an altar, and the night a kind of ritual. Even the wind has a quiet, animal quality: it "skirrs" across the fir tops, a sound-word that suggests a light, rapid brushing, like something passing overhead.
The middle stanza is the heart of the poem, and its form changes with its mood. Where the first stanza keeps a neat rhymed shape, this one stretches and loosens. Lines vary in length, and the rhymes arrive in unpredictable places: "mile" and "reconcile" are separated by a line, "peace" and "melody" echo each other across a gap. The effect is of thought rather than song, a mind turning over a worry. The worry arrives as a question: "How shall we reconcile / Our hearts to peace?" The word "reconcile" is the surprise. Peace is usually something we welcome, but here the speaker treats it as an adversary to be negotiated with, and the "chill / Grey stones of town" make it sound more like confinement than comfort. Note, too, the line break after "chill." The word hangs at the end of its line before the grey stones arrive, so the coldness is felt before it is explained.
The memories that follow are the poem's richest imagery, and they have a dreamlike strangeness. The travellers have seen "cities fallen into dream" and "lost and silent harbours" haunted by the "phantom spars / Of ships forgotten by the seas." These are not realistic travel notes. The places seem half-imagined, beautiful because they are abandoned, and the repeated words "lost," "forgotten," "fallen," "phantom" give the whole catalogue an elegiac tone. Adventure here means encountering things at the edge of disappearance. Then the landscape warms into colour: "blossomy fires / Of hidden valleys," "secret springs," and finally a "frozen wood" flooded with "silver." Notice how often fire and light recur in these descriptions, so that the present campfire is just the last of many. The stanza ends on that silver image, a moment of stillness, almost holy, which is exactly what the speaker fears will not survive the walk into town.
The final stanza is shorter and quieter. The "strong / Worn sandals of adventure" come off in a gesture that is both practical and symbolic: the speaker is taking off a way of life. The tense shift is subtle but important. "The moon burns high, but I shall lie dark long," the speaker says, and the dark here suggests rest but also something heavier, a long stillness to come. The plan is to hoard the night, "enshrining for the bleak white hours this sweet / Deep-breathing night." The word "bleak" is aimed at the future, at ordinary days, and the poem's emotional logic becomes clear: memory is the only thing that can be carried into the town. The closing line, with stars that "glow cool across the eyes," returns to the senses, as if the speaker is trying to press the sky into the body before it is lost.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about an unfashionable feeling. Most poems about travel celebrate the road or celebrate coming home. This one lingers in the awkward space between, where the traveller has changed and cannot be sure the world of "grey stones" has room for the change. It does this with images that are physical and vivid rather than abstract, and with a structure that quietly mirrors the night it describes: busy, reflective, then still.