Edward Thomas begins by refusing the argument everyone else is having. The Kaiser and the "Germans" place the poem in the First World War, yet the first line insists this is "no case of petty right or wrong / That politicians or philosophers / Can judge." He will not hate the enemy on cue, and he will not "grow hot / With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers." His targets are the noisy ones. "One fat patriot" annoys him so much that, by comparison, his hatred of the Kaiser, "a kind of god he is, banging a gong," feels like "love true". The joke is bitter. "Fat" suggests a patriot who is comfortable and safe, and the gong makes both figures into producers of racket rather than thought.
Noise is the poem's problem, and its language shows it. "Dinned" is stranded at the end of a line, so the reader is hit by the word before the sentence can continue. Out of all this "war and argument" he can read no more than "in the storm smoking along the wind / Athwart the wood." The storm is a sharp, physical image of confusion, and it is weather, something no debate can change. Then the poem turns strange. "Two witches' cauldrons roar", which recalls the witches of *Macbeth* and suggests prophecy and doubt. One brews "weather... clear and gay". The other brews "an England beautiful / And like her mother that died yesterday." That line can be read more than one way. Perhaps the new England will carry fresh grief, like a daughter in mourning. Perhaps she will be the old England's image, loved all the more because it is gone. Either way, the beauty arrives with loss attached.
Thomas then makes fun of his own limits. He doesn't care if, "being dull," he misses what "historians / Can rake out of the ashes." The verb makes historians into scavengers poking through cinders, while the phoenix, the bird that rises from those ashes, "broods serene above their ken." Whatever hope there is lies beyond analysis.
The form fits this. The lines are loosely iambic pentameter, but the rhymes are scattered and late: "wrong" waits until "gong" six lines later, and "hot" is answered by "patriot" only after another line has intervened. Sentences run over the line-ends, so the poem sounds like a mind working something out, not a song. Near the end the pattern tightens into two couplets, "dust" with "trust" and "so" with "foe", and the voice grows plain and nearly monosyllabic: "She is all we know and live by." The argument seems to settle into place as the rhymes close up.
The turn comes at "But with the best and meanest Englishmen / I am one in crying, God save England." Thomas drops his private scepticism and joins the crowd, but for his own reason: "lest / We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed." What matters here is freedom, and the grammar says it is something only people who have it can value. England is "made from the dust" by "the ages," so the country is as old as the people, not a slogan. Even here he says "we trust / She is good" rather than "we know," so faith is admitted to be faith.
The last line carries the poem's hardest thought: "as we love ourselves we hate her foe." Hate, which he denied in line three, comes back, but it has changed. It is no longer hatred of "Germans" as a people but of an enemy defined only by his threat to something loved, and it grows out of love rather than propaganda. Readers may find that comforting or chilling, and the poem seems to know it.
That honesty is what makes the poem matter. It rejects both jingoism and the clever detachment of "philosophers," and builds patriotism from what Thomas can honestly claim: attachment to a place and its people. Knowing that Thomas was killed at Arras in 1917 gives "must endure" extra weight, but the poem is already moving without that knowledge.