Clear eyes, we assume, are open eyes. Edward Thomas begins by overturning that. "That girl's clear eyes utterly concealed all / Except that there was something to reveal." The clarity itself is the disguise: the only thing her eyes give away is that there is something to give away. It is a small paradox, and the rest of the poem follows it down.
The speaker then turns on himself. "And what did mine say in the interval? / No more: no less." The colon and the flat, balanced phrase sound like a shrug, but the image that follows is bleaker. His eyes are "a seal / Not to be broken till after I am dead; / And then vainly." The joke is a dark one, since even death will not open him. From there the poem widens from "I" to everyone: "Every one of us / This morning at our tasks left nothing said, / In spite of many words." The comparison to "tombs" arrives quietly, and it is chilling because it describes ordinary people chatting at work. Talk, the poem says, can be a way of saying nothing.
The form carries this idea in a sly way. Fourteen lines rhyming *abab cdcd efef gg* is the pattern of a Shakespearean sonnet, yet Thomas hardly lets it show. Sentences ignore the line endings ("Every one of us / This morning"), the rhythm is the loose, iambic beat of someone thinking aloud, and the diction is mostly plain and monosyllabic. Some rhymes are gentle, such as "all" and "interval". The effect is a poem that sounds like private confession and quietly carries a formal structure underneath. The turn comes at line nine with "Nor until now could I admit," a phrase that feels like someone owning up to something reluctantly.
What he admits is oddly physical. "All I cared for was the pleasure and pain / I tasted" in a "stony square sunlit," in "dark cloisters," under the "shade of airy plane." The verb "tasted" makes feeling a matter of the senses rather than of speech, and the scene is built from contrasts: sun against shade, heavy stone against airy leaves. "Stony" also echoes "tombs", so the setting seems to share the speakers' stillness. Then comes the loudest word in the poem: "While music blazed." The music is bright and public, and it makes the silence of the morning more striking. Judging by the imagery, this is some ceremonial or school-like occasion, but the poem never says so. It gives only the sensations, which fits its argument that what matters most in a day is the part nobody speaks.
The ending is the poem's best stroke. "Children, line after line, / Marched past, hiding the 'SEVENTEEN THIRTY- / NINE.'" The capitals suggest a carved inscription, a date cut into stone, which is about as public and permanent as a statement can get. The living children walk in front of it and block it out. Moving life covers the fixed record, just as outward behaviour covers inner life. The date is also split mid-word across the last two lines, so the sonnet's final couplet ("line" and "NINE") ends with a number broken in half. Even the form is partly hidden at the end, as the eyes were at the start.
Nothing is resolved. The speaker does not complain about this sealed condition or look for a cure, and he does not claim that the girl, or anyone, has a secret worth knowing. He observes that we are mostly unreadable, to others and perhaps to ourselves, and that he only now admits what he really cared about that morning.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth reading. A glance at a girl's eyes becomes an argument about privacy, speech and the gap between what we feel and what we show, and Thomas makes it with plain words and a sonnet shape he barely lets us notice. The poem does not shout its subject. Like the carved date behind the marching children, it leaves the reader to look past the surface.