Winter has not yet arrived, and a thrush is already singing as if it were April. Edward Thomas builds his poem on that mismatch. The speaker stands at the end of a lane, looking at the bird "alone... / Near the bare poplar's tip," and starts questioning it. In the opening stanza he asks what the thrush can "read" in November, with winter still ahead, that it didn't read in April, "When Winter's dead." The question hints at the answer: apparently nothing. The bird sings the same song whatever the season.
The second and third stanzas wonder why. Perhaps the thrush knows something, that "even as in April, / So in November, / Winter is gone that must go." Then the speaker gets sharper. Maybe the bird's "lore" is just a refusal to sort time into pieces: "Not to call November November, / And April April, / And Winter Winter--no more." The repeated names are the poem's cleverest trick. The sentence goes in circles, with each word naming only itself, which is what the thrush's way of knowing seems to be like: no labels, no distinctions, only the present.
The word "But" opens the fifth stanza and turns the poem toward the human side. The speaker does know the months, "and their sweet names," and cannot stop knowing them, however loudly the bird goes on, "As you call and call." The result is a different kind of attention. He must "remember / What died into April" and "consider what will be born / Of a fair November." Thomas's phrasing is strange and exact. Winter doesn't simply end; it "died into" spring, as if one season's death were the other's raw material. November is called "fair" because of what may come from it. In the seventh stanza the speaker's love becomes oddly conditional. He loves April "for what / It was born of" and November "For what it will die in." Judging by the wording, the months are never loved just as they are, but through what lies behind and ahead of them, "What they are and what they are not."
The form fits this tug between thought and song. The poem is eight quatrains, and in every one the first and last lines rhyme while the middle two do not: ahead and dead, know and go, all and call, kind and behind. The inner lines are left loose, so each stanza seems to close over a small gap. The lines are short and the rhythm uneven, closer to someone thinking aloud than to a tidy lyric. The effects are small but telling. "Continuously" is a long, trailing adverb that stretches the stanza to reach its rhyme with "see," as the bird's song stretches. "Call and call" repeats itself like the singing. The poem's first word of substance is "ahead" and its last is "behind," so the whole poem is wrapped in the two directions the speaker keeps looking.
Those directions are what the final stanza sets against the bird. The thrush loves "what is kind, / What you can sing in / And love and forget in." The key word is "forget." The speaker can't forget, and the poem never pretends otherwise. It also doesn't scold the thrush or praise it too highly. The tone seems wistful rather than superior or bitter, and the speaker has a hint of envy for a creature that can treat "All that's ahead and behind" as one place to sing in.
That is what makes the poem worth reading closely. It starts as a small nature scene, one bird, one lane, one bare tree, and turns into a quiet comparison of two ways of living in time. It resists the easy idea that a singing bird is simply cheerful and the human listener simply gloomy. Thomas is a poet of plain speech and hesitant argument, and he lets the thought stay unresolved. Knowing that he was killed in the First World War in 1917, a reader may find more weight in the last lines about what is ahead and behind. That is an inference from hindsight, though, not something the poem says. What the poem does say, without fuss, is that memory and foresight make our love richer and more painful, and that a bird's carelessness can look, for a moment, like a gift.