I love especially here that the man stands at the beginning "at the head of the glen" --one imagines the "head" as being important and forward and yet it is in a secluded narrow valley that he stands, in the way his forefathers stood. (And even so after "hope" has gone. He continues in the action, in his work, as he "stoops" and "stooks" (this is a new word I learned here...the stacking of the grain--as we see it in fields) and "scythes" all such traditional motions, which still provide nourishment and yet there is a dismal feeling to the repetition that no longer has the potency perhaps, of the past. In this poem, as in "sleeping giants", your form has meaning--in this as the man, and in the other as the line of the boat into the lake...