The word “seek” frames the questioner’s path as a spiritual journey: a quest for salvation, for a bed at road’s end. To “seek” implies a high degree of intention. The guide’s reply is cryptic. There are “beds for all who come.” Whether “all” refers solely to seekers or encompasses non-seekers as well is unclear. This lack of clarity is part of the poem’s purpose. There are no simple answers to spiritual questions.

This line introduces an intriguing complication to the poem’s concept of the afterlife. When reworded, the line’s logic can be understood in a different way: in the afterlife, one receives comfort equal to the amount of labour done during one’s life. The precise nature of the labour is not clear, but one assumes it carries a sense of religious morality and thus is tied to good deeds.

The word “wayfarer” comes from Germanic roots: “way” means “road”; “farer” means “goer” or “traveller.” In archaic use, the verb “to fare” was used to signal a departure from life. This meaning is highly relevant to Rossetti’s poem, in which the wayfarers are travellers along a metaphorical road through life into death.

Rossetti uses alternating meters for the voices of the traveller and guide. The traveller’s questions all fall into lines of iambic pentameter. The guide usually replies in trimeter, though on several occasions speaks in tetrameter and pentameter. The trimeter lines, with their three swift beats, are particularly suited for conveying the tonal differences between the characters. The traveller is desperate and searching, filling long lines with questions. The guide is sure and cryptic, dealing out appropriately short lines.

In most literary uses, the duality of light and darkness serves one of two metaphorical purposes. Light and darkness signal good and evil, as well as knowledge and ignorance. In this line and the next, “darkness” may draw on both metaphors. The questioner wonders whether wickedness or ignorance will hide the resting-place at the end of the road from sight. The reply—“You cannot miss that inn”—indicates that we all eventually reach the road’s end.

The use of the verb “begins” contrasts the “end” mentioned in the second line. The suggestion is that the resting-place marks the end of the road and yet the beginning of something else. Thus the “slow dark hours” are a metaphor for the afterlife or the transition into it.

The relationship between the two speakers is never made entirely explicit. Aspects of their rapport seem to be modelled after the well-known duo of Dante and Virgil, the central characters of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Dante is a pilgrim on a spiritual quest with his friend, guide, and fellow poet Virgil offering him advice and information along the way. Similarly, the questioner in this poem is set on a spiritual road and receives information by a guide who characterizes the relationship as a kind of friendship.

This line reveals one of the poem’s other primary conceits: the course of a day as a lifetime. The journey on the road lasts “from morn to night,” so that the arrival of darkness signals the nearing of the end of life.

Rossetti uses a call-and-response format in “Uphill.” The poem is narrated by two voices, who speak in alternating lines. The first voice is the questioner, the traveller who wishes to understand the road ahead. The second voice is the guide who knows more of the journey and shares wisdom about it one piece at a time.

The language Rossetti uses to describe the road directs our attention to the poem’s central conceit: the road is the path of life. Like our lives, the road “wind[s]” in the sense that its twists and turns are unpredictable. It is “uphill” in the sense that it requires of us ongoing struggle and toil.

“Resting-place” in this line holds a double meaning. On one level, the speaker is literally looking for a place to rest for the night before continuing their great journey the next day. On another level, “resting-place” can also be read as a final or eternal “resting-place,” like a grave.