Gone, Gone Again Gone, gone again,May, June, July,And August gone,Again gone by, Not memorableSave that I saw them go,As past the empty quaysThe rivers flow. And now again,In the harvest rain,The Blenheim orangesFall grubby from the trees As when I was youngAnd when the lost one was hereAnd when the war beganTo turn young men to dung.

Title: The title employs Thomas’s characteristic repetition: the repetition of ‘gone’ affords the poem a wistful tone as the speaker explores the incessant passing of time – one of the many cycles that Thomas’s poems explore

The fact that the first stanza is ‘book-ended’ by the word ‘gone’ and contains a progression of months in the centre indicates that the passing of time frustrates / saddens the speaker. The ABCB rhyme scheme could replicate the gentle, circular repetition described

In the second stanza, the speaker reflects on the fact that time has passed without any ‘memorable’ event, in contrast to the carpe diem sentiment expressed in some other poems, such as March. The closing simile suggests both a literal and a metaphorical emptiness: the quays are devoid of people who may well include the men away at war

The rhyme scheme shifts here to AABC as the tone shifts to a more specific memory: the Blenheim oranges (which are apples) falling. Compare with the use of the rotten apple in The Sun Used to Shine

Again the rhyme scheme shifts to form a quatrain with ABCA – perhaps a purposefully cyclical rhyme scheme which replicates the repetition of the falling apples from the speaker’s youth. The ‘lost one’ could refer to any thing/person, perhaps making the sense of loss universal. The abrupt shift from nature to war is a characteristic of Thomas’s poetry, as he compares the two. Nostalgia pervades the poem, as well as a sense of regret that ‘young men’ are turned into ‘dung’, a striking image which takes away any notion that war is glamorous

Look at the old house,Outmoded, dignified,Dark and untenanted,With grass growing instead Of the footsteps of life,The friendliness, the strife;In its beds have lainYouth, love, age, and pain: I am something like that;Only I am not dead,Still breathing and interestedIn the house that is not dark:-- I am something like that:Not one pane to reflect the sun,For the schoolboys to throw at--They have broken every one.

The ‘old house’ can be read as a symbol of decay . An empty house seems erroneous as homes are meant to symbolise family, community, sociability. They are meant to be lit, tenanted and full of life – everything which this house is not. The image of the ‘footsteps of life’ conceives, as Thomas often does, of life as a journey – but one with its inevitable end, death. Thomas uses a contrast of ‘friendliness’ and ‘strife’ to acknowledge that life is composed of both positive and negative emotions, but both are to be welcomed as, without human life, there are none hereThe personified emotions remind the reader of the life that no longer exists here. In the absence of people, emotions have been embodied to fill the void

The speaker seems trapped in a living death: he sees himself as ‘something like’ an embodied emotion. His ‘breathing’ seems to be his only sign of life. He hopes for a ‘house that is not dark’, that is, a return to the time before the war where the house was inhabited and full of lifeThe repetition of the earlier phrase perhaps repeats the speaker’s frustration at his current state. The intense darkness is reiterated as, even if there were any ‘sun’ (i.e. light) there is no ‘pane’ of glass in the house to redouble it. The fact that the final verse repeats a similar rhyme scheme to the first suggests that, having tried several variations, the speaker has come to accept that time will pass and little will change, regardless of his approach. The broken windows may symbolise his loss of hope, the fact that he is a ‘broken’ man