A soldier wakes to a bugle call and, half for amusement, fits words to it. The words he finds are a shrug in the face of death: no one cares less than he does whether he ends up "under a foreign clod". The poem is only ten lines long, yet it moves from this bravado to something colder. The bugles he has been talking to do not care either, and never did.
The first stanza gives us the verses he made up, set in quotation marks. They are brisk and nearly nursery-rhyme simple, rhyming ABAB (*I* / *God* / *lie* / *clod*), and the short lines march along as a bugle phrase might. The claim itself is carefully balanced. "No one cares less than I" sounds casual, even jaunty, but the next line, "Nobody knows but God," quietly admits that the future is a real question. The speaker may be less indifferent than he says. "Foreign clod" matters here too. A clod is a dull, heavy lump of earth, and the word takes away any glamour from dying abroad. Compare Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier," where a foreign grave becomes a corner of England forever. Thomas offers no such comfort, only soil.
Then comes the long fifth line, which breaks the pattern. It steps outside the quotation marks and tells us where the words came from: "the bugle call in the morning." It is stretched out and indented, as if the bugle note were trailing away. It also leaves "morning" without a rhyme inside its own stanza, which creates a small itch the second stanza has to scratch.
It does, and the poem turns. "But laughing, storming, scorning" is a burst of three participles, loose and restless. The poem does not say who is doing the laughing, storming and scorning. Judging by the rhythm, it could be the speaker's mood, or the energy of the bugle notes. Either reading works, and the blur seems deliberate. Then the poem gets quieter and more exact: "Only the bugles know / What the bugles say in the morning." This echoes "Nobody knows but God," but now the knower has shrunk from God to a brass instrument. Even that knowledge is empty, because the bugles "do not care, when they blow." The call is a signal with no feeling behind it. Whatever it seems to say, whether defiance, fear or fate, is what the listener has put there. The soldier's jaunty verses turn out to be his own invention, laid over a sound that means nothing in itself.
The rhymes tighten to match. The second stanza runs ABABA, with *scorning*, *morning*, and the final "this morning" all chiming, so the poem ends on the word that was left hanging earlier. The word "morning" appears three times in the second stanza and the first stanza's long line, and it gives the poem its ordinary, repeated setting. Nothing grand is happening. This is just another dawn, another call, and the possibility of death sits inside the routine. The final line is also the longest, and it stumbles slightly over "early this morning," as though the speaker were insisting on the freshness of the moment because he cannot say anything larger.
The poem matters for what it refuses to do. It has no rallying cry, no glory and no consoling afterlife. Edward Thomas was killed at Arras in 1917, and knowing that gives the speaker's offhand "no one cares less than I" a sharper edge, though the poem works without it. The soldier's indifference may be armor, or it may be real exhaustion. The poem leaves that open. What it does say clearly is that the machinery calling men to the war is deaf to them, and that the only meaning in the morning is whatever a person can scrape together to sing back at it. That small, wry act of making words is human and stubborn, and in a poem so quiet it carries most of the feeling.