Edward Thomas opens with a joke almost too small to notice. "November's days are thirty" recalls the old rhyme for remembering the calendar, and the next line drops it into the gutter: "November's earth is dirty." The tune is jaunty, but the subject is the least charming month and its least charming substance. What follows is a quiet argument that mud deserves attention, and that how a person treats it shows how he looks at everything above it.
The first stanza is a lesson in looking down. The "prettiest things on ground" are not flowers but paths, marked "with morning and evening hobnails dinted, / With foot and wing-tip overprinted / Or separately charactered." The vocabulary comes from printing and writing, so the ground becomes a page and the tracks of "little beast and little bird" become its text. Beauty here is a record of small lives. Then comes a list of what the flood has pounded together: "Twig, leaf, flint, thorn, / Straw, feather, all that men scorn." The blunt monosyllables pile up like the debris they name, yet set side by side the items look oddly lovely. The stanza ends on a courtroom word, "Condemned as mud." This is a verdict the poem has just undermined, since we have seen what the mud contains.
The second stanza turns on "But" and lifts its eyes. The sky is "Clean and clear and sweet and cold," each "and" adding another breath of cold air. There is a nice paradox in the cloud that "Sails over in silence though winds are loud," and a formal balance in the full moon in the east that "Looks at the planet in the west," like two watchers facing each other across the dark. Below them the earth is "silent as it is black, / Yet not unhappy for its lack." That personification is gentle, and the flat, matter-of-fact rhyme of black with lack suits an earth that accepts what it is without fuss.
Then two kinds of people stare upward. The first "imagines a refuge there / Above the mud, in the pure bright / Of the cloudless heavenly light." The rhyme of bright and light is smooth, almost too easy, which may hint at how easy the fantasy of escape is. The second man's thought is much knottier. He loves earth and November because "without them, he sees clearly, / The sky would be nothing more to his eye / Than he, in any case, is to the sky." As I read it, a sky with no earth beneath it would be vast and indifferent, as indifferent to him as it already is. The ground gives the heavens a scale and a meaning. "Clearly" also puns on the clean skies, and the tangled syntax makes the idea feel hard-won. The last couplet turns the mud into something almost saintly: "He loves even the mud whose dyes / Renounce all brightness to the skies." "Renounce" is a monk's word. The mud's dull browns give up their brightness so that the sky can shine.
The poem never says which man it sides with, but the first stanza's sympathy for what "men scorn," and the weight of that closing couplet, make the answer plain.
The form supports the argument. The poem is written in short, mostly four-beat lines and rhymed couplets, which could sound like a nursery rhyme. Slant rhymes keep roughening it: "last" and "paths," "charactered" and "bird," "flood" and "mud." The stanzas are uneven too, sixteen lines and then twenty, as if the thought runs on until it has finished. The diction stays plain and close to speech, with almost no ornament except the printing metaphor.
The poem matters because it refuses two easy responses to a dreary month. One is to sneer at the mud, and the other is to flee to a "heavenly" refuge. Thomas suggests instead that the humble ground is what lets us see the sky at all. That is a modest idea, but the poem delivers it with enough wit and close observation to make a reader look down at a muddy path with new respect.