Two friends walk through fields, stop at gates, talk or stay quiet as they please, and part cheerfully each night. That is almost all that happens in Edward Thomas's "The Sun Used to Shine," and by the last stanza even those walks are being washed away like marks on a beach. The poem's central idea is calm and unsettling. Everything, even something as warm as this friendship, is headed for the same faintness as the faraway war the friends once heard about only as rumour.
The title gives the ending away. "Used to shine" is past tense, so the poem is an elegy from its first words, even while the opening stanza sounds entirely at ease. Thomas lets the form do some of the work. In "paused and started / Again," the line break makes the reader pause and start too. Sentences ignore the gaps between stanzas, as when "cheerfully parted" spills into "Each night," or "our eyes" into "Could as well imagine." The effect is a stroll that never stops at the stanza's edge. Underneath, the structure is strict: eight quatrains, all rhymed *abab*, in a loose, speech-like iambic beat. The rhymes are modest ("be" with "poetry," "and" with "sand"), so the form feels like conversation rather than performance.
The details are chosen for their smallness. "We never disagreed / Which gate to rest on" is a tiny measure of closeness. The friends give "small heed" to "the to be / And the late past," which means they live wholly in the present. That is what makes its loss painful later.
The war stays at the edge of the talk but seeps into the vocabulary. The friends turn to "rumours of the war remote" only until they are distracted by an apple's "yellow flavorous coat," which wasps have "undermined." That word belongs to trench warfare and tunnelling, and here it is applied to fruit. Soon a clump of betony becomes "a sentry," standing guard at the forest edge, and the crocuses look as if born "in sunless Hades fields," a glimpse of the underworld in a spring meadow. Even when the war is not being discussed, the landscape is dressed in its language. The moonrise also links the friends to "soldiers in the east afar," but the word "then" holds that connection at a distance.
The turn comes with "Nevertheless." The friends can imagine the present war as easily as "the Crusades / Or Caesar's battles," so it has already become history in their minds. Then Thomas turns the idea on them: "Everything / To faintness like those rumours fades." The rumour of war becomes the pattern for their own disappearance. A list of similes follows, with the glittering brook, "those walks," and then, after a sharp little "Now," "us two that took them." The speaker is placing himself among the vanishing things. "Memory's sand" under a returning tide is a fitting image for a poem about walking, since sand is where footsteps are kept and lost.
The last stanza shows how little the world will notice. "Other men through other flowers" will walk the same fields "under the same moon," and the moon that watched soldiers and lit the brook now watches strangers. Thomas calls their hours "easy," a word that is generous rather than bitter, though it is also a little chilling. The poem is consoling and bleak at once, because the continuing of life is the very thing that erases the friends.
Thomas was killed in the First World War, and it is tempting to hear that war behind the poem, though the text never names it. Readers often connect the walking companion with Robert Frost, Thomas's close friend, but the poem keeps him anonymous as "we two," which makes the experience easier to share. The poem is significant because it is a war poem that hardly describes war. It shows what ordinary life consists of, a gate, an apple, a shared silence, and so what is at stake when everything is threatened. It does this without self-pity, and it ends by wishing the next walkers well.