"Tears" opens with a confession that sounds like an accusation against the speaker: "It seems I have no tears left." The poem then gives two moments when he should have wept, and in both he was overwhelmed by beauty rather than sorrow. The first is a pack of hounds sweeping past him. The second is a changing of the guard on an April morning. The central idea is that the most powerful experiences can't be answered with tears, and that they may not stay with us either. The poem ends by admitting that the "truths" those moments revealed have been lost.
The hounds come first, and Thomas makes them thrillingly physical. They are "not yet combed out", a grooming image that suggests a tangled, bristling mass. They are "all equals in their rage of gladness", a phrase that holds two opposite feelings together. Then twenty animals become "one, like a great dragon", and the simile moves into myth. The dragon lies in "Blooming Meadow that bends towards the sun / And once bore hops". The tiny phrase "once bore" tucks a loss into the landscape. The field has stopped producing, but the pack's wild energy passes over it anyway. Even the speaker's tears are handled gently: "Their ghosts, if tears have ghosts, did fall." The dry aside shows a mind that is wry and careful about claiming too much.
The second scene begins in the "double-shadowed Tower". Judging by the setting and the soldiers' ceremony, this seems to be a fortress, and the phrase suggests shade cast by the building and perhaps the weight of its past. The speaker steps out into "an April morning, stirring and sweet / And warm", and the line breaks as though he is pausing to feel the warmth. The vocabulary then turns magical. "A mightier charm than any in the Tower / Possessed the courtyard." Beauty is presented as a spell, and the speaker is held by it. The soldiers are "young English countrymen, / Fair-haired and ruddy, in white tunics", so they carry the fields with them into the courtyard. Like the hounds, they are many made one, moving as a single unit to the "Drums / And fifes" playing "The British Grenadiers". The enjambment splits "Drums" from "fifes" across the line, so the music seems to arrive in pieces and then gather.
The poem's sound is quiet, which makes its effects more striking. It is unrhymed and mostly iambic pentameter, but the rhythm loosens whenever the speaker is caught up in an image. The line about the hounds spills over into the stranded "out" on a line of its own, as though the pack were too big for the page. Rhyme would have given the experience a tidy shape, and Thomas withholds it because the experience doesn't resolve. Short sentences cut through the long ones: "Strange solitude was there and silence." The stillness is real, and the music has to break it.
The key verb is "piercing". The music pierces the solitude and silence, and the word makes beauty feel almost like a wound. This may explain why tears don't come. The men and the music "told me truths I had not dreamed", so the moment is a revelation, and a revelation leaves no room for ordinary crying. The final line then removes the revelation: "And have forgotten since their beauty passed." The word "passed" is flat and final. The truths vanished along with the beauty that carried them, and the speaker is left only with the knowledge that he once understood something.
Readers who know that Thomas was killed at Arras in 1917 may find the soldiers harder to look at, with their fair hair and white tunics. Nothing in the poem mentions war, so that sadness belongs to hindsight rather than to the text. Still, the courtyard scene pictures young men as part of the English countryside, shining and brief, at a moment when the speaker feels he is seeing clearly. What makes "Tears" significant is its honesty about that failure. It doesn't pretend to have kept the truth it glimpsed, and it makes the loss of that knowledge more moving than any tears would have been.