Eight lines, and the poem travels from the inside of a mind to the yard of a farm. It begins in the dark, among thoughts that seem to have grown unchecked, and it ends with people lacing up their boots. What happens between is a small piece of sunrise theatre. Two cocks crow, the night's mental undergrowth is cleared, and the morning arrives with a flourish that the last line then gently, and deliberately, deflates.
The opening sentence is a long, suspended one. "Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night / To be cut down by the sharp axe of light" gives us no main verb for a full three lines. Only at "two cocks together crow" does the sentence arrive, and the delay works like the night itself, which seems to drag on until something breaks it. The picture is vivid: night-time thoughts become a wood, dense and tangled, perhaps even a little threatening, and daylight is the woodcutter. The speaker's own state is only implied, but the poem suggests someone lying awake and mentally lost, glad of any sound that ends the dark. The repeated "Out of" in lines one and three adds to the sense of emerging, as if the speaker were pushing through branches toward a clearing.
The axe does not disappear after line two. The crowing is "Cleaving the darkness with a silver blow," so the cocks take over the woodcutter's work. Sound becomes metal and colour, and "silver" gives the cry a hard, bright edge. The word "blow" is neat too, since it can mean a stroke of the axe and also a blast on a horn, which prepares for the trumpets that follow.
Those trumpets arrive in the second half. "Bright before my eyes twin trumpeters stand" shifts from hearing to seeing, and the speaker pictures what he has heard. The birds are now "Heralds of splendour," announcing the day as courtly messengers would announce a king. The most inventive stroke is "Each facing each as in a coat of arms." Heraldic shields are often flanked by two matching figures, and the cocks, one "at either hand," take up that formal, mirrored pose. The poem is mirrored as well. Its rhymed couplets (night/light, crow/blow, stand/hand, arms/farms) come in pairs, like the two birds. The speaker even seems to sit in the middle, in the place of the shield, with a bird on each side.
The metre is the traditional ten-syllable, iambic line, which gives the verse a measured, ceremonial steadiness that suits the heraldry. Because the rhythm is so regular, the final line has real force: "The milkers lace their boots up at the farms." After all the "silver," "splendour" and "trumpeters," the language drops to short, plain, everyday words. Nobody is crowned. Workers are simply getting ready for the morning milking. The line rhymes with "arms," so the noble emblem and the working farm are locked together in the same couplet, and the poem seems to say they belong together.
That last line can be read in a couple of ways. It might be a gentle joke at the speaker's own expense, as if the grand vision were a little overblown next to the real business of the day. It might also suggest that the true splendour is already there in the farms, and that the cocks' fanfare is for the milkers as much as for any king. The poem does not choose between these readings, and its small size gives it a kind of balance.
Its significance lies in this compression and in the turn at the end. In very little space it moves from night to day, from thought to action, and from ornate imagery to plain fact, and it makes the shift feel natural rather than abrupt. It also shows how ordinary country sounds can set off a grand imaginative response, while the poem declines to let that grandeur have the last word. The final picture is a human one, of boots being laced in the first light.