A flock of starlings, a field being ploughed, and suddenly a thousand years fold up like a map. Edward Thomas starts with an ordinary scene: black rooks and white gulls trailing the plough, the front birds dropping behind until a single "caw" sends the rear ones flying to the front. From this small, repeating pattern the poem builds a larger claim. The natural world runs on cycles so old that human time barely registers against them, and human beings answer with war and with a God of their own making, one who cannot help them.
The bird-law of the octave is quietly comic and quietly unsettling. A "caw" that "commands" gives the rooks a chain of authority, and "parleying starlings" lends the flock the language of negotiation between armies. The line "the first are last... last are first again" also echoes the Gospel saying about the last being first. Here the idea is shrunk to a habit of birds following a plough, so something once promised as a great reversal becomes routine. The word "law" sits at the end of line 5, and the poem treats this tiny, repetitive order as the only law that has really held for a thousand years.
The form is a sonnet, and its sound is the most inventive thing about it. The octave rhymes abbaabba, but the rhyme words come from just two sounds. "Saw," "caw," "law" and "shaw" all share one, and "now," "plough," "how" and "brow" share the other. The octave therefore drones and circles back on itself like the flock, and one of its rhymes is literally a bird's cry. The syntax adds to this. The opening sentence is long and winding, with the verbs "heard" and "saw" stranded at the end of a line, and it sweeps across line breaks ("dreamed / how / A thousand years"). Inside it sits a speaker who imagines a man in the past imagining his own death, "dust" lying "on his brow." The effect is a series of nested lookings-back, and the birds carry on unchanged through all of them.
The sestet turns on "Time swims before me." The verb "swims" makes time fluid and dizzying, and the phrase "a thousand years" (now the second in the poem) is shrunk to "a day." This may recall the biblical idea that a thousand years are as a day to God, though here it is a human mind that does the compressing. Sound takes over as well. The oak "roars mill-like," so a tree takes on the machinery and noise of a mill, and the verb picks up the "roar" of the starlings in line 1. The same roaring then covers the men who "strike and bear the stroke / Of war." The poem does not name any particular war, and "as ever" makes it a permanent condition, met by people who are either "audacious or resigned."
The last two lines carry the poem's real force. "Array" can mean an arrangement, such as the dress and display of religion, but it is also a military word, a battle line. God "still sits aloft" in the array "that we have wrought him," and "wrought" suggests something hammered or carved by hand. The closing "stone-deaf and stone-blind" fits this: a carved figure cannot hear prayers or see suffering. The rhyme also joins "resigned" to "blind," so human resignation and divine blindness end up locked together.
The poem is significant because it manages such a bleak view without raising its voice. There is no battlefield, no outcry, only birds, a plough and an oak. The pronouns also shift, from distant "men" to "one, like me" to the final "we," which makes the reader share the blame for the stone God. Nature's cycles are not comforting here, since they are simply indifferent, and the poem's chill comes from how calmly it sets human conflict against that steady background.