Three wet days have just ended, and the first thing Edward Thomas does is let the sun look. "The peering sun / Sees what has been done." The sun is a cautious inspector arriving after a disaster, and the day it enters is "pale choked," as if the weather has been crying or coughing. From there the poem goes on looking. There is no "I" and no stated feeling. Thomas gives us a copse, a road and a dell, and trusts the details to carry the mood.
The form suits that patience. The poem is thirteen rhymed couplets, and in most of them a longer line is followed by a short one: "The rain of a night and a day and a night / Stops at the light." The first line rolls on its chain of "and"s, as if the rain will never end. The second stops almost at once. Across the poem this long-then-short pattern feels like drip following drip. The rhymes are plain and chime quickly (*hue*/*grass* aside, think of *torn*/*thorn*, *bare*/*there*), yet the sentences keep spilling over the line breaks, so the rhyme never sounds like a performance. "For all that has / Been left by November of leaves is torn / From hazel and thorn" takes a whole couplet to get its breath. The effect is of someone talking quietly while noticing things, with the rhyme almost hidden in the talk.
The imagery is quite specific. Thomas gives the ground a palette: "grey grass, green moss, burnt-orange fern," and a road edged first with grass and then with a new border of purple. The most surprising image is the ash leaflets lying "like little black fish, inlaid, / As if they played." The wet road becomes water, and the fallen leaves become living things. "Inlaid" also sounds like a craftsman's word, as though the storm had set them into the surface on purpose. The stillness around them matters too. When the wind returns, "No dead leaf drops," because the rain has already stripped everything that could fall. The damage is complete, and that gives the calm a slightly eerie quality.
Then comes the poem's brightest moment. Among all the "hard and bare" branches hangs "twelve yellow apples lovely to see / On one crab-tree." The exact number is the key. Thomas counts instead of gesturing at "fruit," and the counting makes the small treasure feel real. The word "lovely" is simple and unembarrassed. Crab apples are a modest fruit, and the poem does not dress them up. They are simply worth looking at. The final couplets then widen the view to "each twig of every tree," where raindrops hang as "Crystals both dark and bright." The sentence has no verb of its own and borrows "hangs" from the apples before it, so the fruit and the raindrops end up in one shared picture. The word "Uncountable" stands alone on its line, which sets the twelve apples against the countless drops.
The last two words, "begins again," change how we read the title. "After Rain" promised an aftermath, but the poem ends with the rain returning, so the clear interval was only a pause. The poem opens and closes with weather, and the beauty in the middle is brief. Because the poem knows this, its attention seems more urgent. It records a moment that will not last.
Thomas was killed at Arras in 1917, during the First World War. Knowing that, it is tempting to hear "what has been done" as more than a comment on weather. That is an inference, though, and the poem never says it. It works fully without such a reading. The poem is memorable for its restraint. It uses ordinary words and trusts a few exact things: black leaves on a road, twelve apples, drops of rain on twigs. It shows that looking carefully at a damaged, ordinary place can be a form of feeling.