I find this a very sad poem, while recognising that for the most part sad writes deeper than happy. One’s home should be a place of sanctuary,  and moving into a new house, at least when one is young, should be a time of excitement and new beginnings, not of bleak forebodings as here. But of course for Edward Thomas, who spent most of his adult life as a poorly rewarded reviewer and hack writer, his home was also his place of work, and thus bound up with his feelings of dissatisfaction, of spending his spirit on uncongenial tasks he knew to be unworthy of him – a common enough situation for most of us but one especially lacerating for the sensitive man who came so late to the discovery of his true gift and had so little time to enjoy it.

The sentiment of the last two lines seems ambiguous. Is Thomas finding some dour consolation in the thought that his troubles are transient and will end with nothing having changed, while the timeless elementals of the earth continue on their uncaring way? Or does the thought of this future wind merely intensify his desolation, his sense of time lost or ill-spent, but either way never to be recaptured?

The New House

Now first, as I shut the door,
    I was alone
In the new house; and the wind
    Began to moan.

Old at once was the house,
    And I was old;
My ears were teased with the dread
    Of what was foretold,

Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;
    Sad days when the sun
Shone in vain: old griefs and griefs
    Not yet begun.

All was foretold me; naught
    Could I foresee;
But I learned how the wind would sound
    After these things should be.

Edward Thomas