Almost nothing happens in "Haymaking", and that is the point. Workers, horses and tools wait in the shade on a hot June morning, "about to begin / But still", and Thomas keeps them waiting for the rest of the poem, until the pause hardens into something permanent.
The opening, though, is full of life. Thunder has rolled away in the night, leaving a day with "a kernel sweet of cold", a phrase that makes the heat a shell around a cool, nutlike centre. The clouds "uncurled" like "the first gods before they made the world / And misery". The comparison sets the morning in a time before trouble, an almost Edenic freshness. The senses crowd in. Mill water tumbles "white and lit / With tossing crystals, happier than any crowd / Of children pouring out of school aloud". Warblers sing "unceasingly", and the swift "shrill shrieked", its wings and tail "as sharp and narrow / As if the bow had flown off with the arrow". That last simile is startling. It is exact about the bird's shape, and it also brings in a faint note of danger.
Then the noise drops away. "Only the scent of woodbine and hay new-mown / Travelled the road." The poem moves from sound to smell, and from movement to rest, and the verbs follow. The tosser, a haymaking implement, "lay forsook". The waggon "stood / Without its team, it seemed it never would / Move". The men "leaned on their rakes". Even the horses enjoy the shade of "three squat oaks", which sit in a circle of uncut grass. Thomas seems to be building a stage set in which nothing may move until he allows it.
The form helps. The poem is written in rhymed couplets, mostly full rhymes like "brook" and "forsook". But Thomas lets some rhymes slip into half-rhyme, as with "clean" and "begin" or "implements" and "hence", so the verse sounds like quiet speech and not like polished performance. His sentences ignore the line endings and then stop dead in the middle of a line: "But still. And all were silent. All was old". The clipped sentences work like a hush falling over the field.
That line leads to the poem's biggest move, a leap in time. The morning is "older than Clare and Cobbett, Morland and Crome", a poet, a prose writer and two painters of the English countryside. The scene is older than the art that tries to record it, older even than the farmhouse "crouched at the foot of a great tree", and it lies "under the heavens that know not what years be". Then comes a twist. The final lines turn the field itself into art. The men, beasts, trees and implements "uttered even what they will in times far hence", and "All of us" are "Immortal in a picture of an old grange." The word "us" pulls the speaker, and the reader, into the frame.
Whether this is comfort or loss is left open. "Gone out of the reach of change" can mean safely escaped, but "gone" also sounds like departure, even death. An earlier detail now looks suspicious: the thicket "where a sleeper / For ever might lie lost". Being fixed for ever in a picture means being unable to move, and the idle waggon that "never would / Move" has already shown what that costs. Readers who know that Thomas was killed at Arras in 1917 may hear an elegy here. The poem never mentions war, and the only shadow in it is the "misery" that the first gods had not yet made, so that reading is an inference and nothing more.
The poem is significant because it takes ordinary rural work, with no heroes, no event and no moral, and shows how a moment becomes permanent. It also asks what is lost when it does. A pause, once preserved, is no longer a pause but a kind of stillness that cannot end, and the poem leaves us admiring that stillness and uneasy about it.