Probably the best interpretation emerges if we observe the structure of the poem. The poem breaks into two-stanza units. In stanza one we are given anyone and his love of life. The locale of the poem is a town, and in the poem the individual is posed against his town. It is a "pretty how" town. How pretty a town it is! Yet, pretty? How? One would do well to look into that prettiness a little further.

When one does look, one finds the group united against the individual. "Women and men" (both large and small?) --no, "both little and small."... "Little" in this sense, intensified by "small," is what these people are like. They sow their "isn't," their dead ideas, and reap the "same" old conventional conclusions. The first two stanzas contrast singing and dancing "anyone" with the men and women of the town.

The third and fourth stanzas make one sentence about the children and noone. There is the Wordsworthian (and New Testament) idea here that children are closer to innocence and perceive spiritual truths more directly than adults. These children perceive "that noone loved him more by more," that is that he was unloved in the town, but that nevertheless he thrived on this rejection. His life was surrounded with love in spite of it or because of it. The children understand that there are values in his life beyond those that make an obedient townsman.

In stanzas five and six the ordinary lives, the lives of the men in the group, come to their dull conclusion and the children grow up to be as dull and imperceptive as their parents. Snow can explain how--the cold touch of time.

In stanzas seven and eight the unloved individual has his death and apotheosis.

In stanza nine the rhythms of life continue as before.

The individual as individual is necessarily set against society and against other people as members of society. It is in the individual's unique responses that the value of life inheres. One does much what others have always done, but with a difference, and one does it oneself, one's own way, with one's own feelings. These unique responses are always distrusted and feared by the group. The group needs communication and regularity of behavior in order to function as a group and so necessarily rejects what is most individual about the individual. But what is comprehended by all is no longer alive, no longer a living idea or feeling. These are old commonplaces but I think they place "anyone" in relation to the Women and men of the town.