Almost nothing happens in this poem except weather and a thought, and that is the point. Edward Thomas puts a man in a "bleak hut" at midnight, surrounds him with rain, and lets him follow one idea until it reaches a conclusion most poems would hesitate to state: the only love he has left is the love of death.
The opening line shows how the poem works. "Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain" says the word three times in one breath, as if the sound has filled the speaker's head. The first six lines have no main verb. They are a list of nouns: rain, hut, solitude, and finally "me", tacked on at the end as one more thing the rain falls on. Only then does a thought arrive, "Remembering again that I shall die". The word "again" tells us this is a habit of mind, and the storm has simply given it room.
The rain is a double image. At first it is almost kind, "washing me cleaner than I have been / Since I was born into this solitude". That is a strange way to describe birth, as an entrance into aloneness, and the cleanness on offer is more like stripping away than joy. Eleven lines later the same action returns with a darker verb, as the rain has "dissolved" every love except one. Washing and dissolving are the same process seen first as comfort, then as loss. In between, the line "Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon" has the lull of a proverb or a beatitude. The clumsy-sounding "rain rains" mimics the drip itself, and the blessing rests on the dead being past needing it. They cannot "hear the rain nor give it thanks".
Then comes the turn: "But here I pray". The cold philosophy gives way to a small, human wish that nobody he once loved is "lying still awake / Solitary, listening to the rain". The comparison that follows is tangled. The sleepless person is "Like a cold water among broken reeds", helpless and moving among things that are "still and stiff". Judging by "Myriads", the reeds seem to stand for the dead, and it is tempting to hear the First World War behind them, since Thomas was killed in it. The poem itself never names any war, though, and it is safer to say that the image makes the living feel stranded among the dead.
The form matches this drifting, private mood. The poem is a single block of eighteen lines with no stanza breaks and no rhyme. The verse is loosely iambic pentameter, but the rhythm stays close to speech, so the thought seems to be forming as we read it. The syntax is loosest at the end. Line 17 closes on "and", and the sentence tips over the line break into "Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint". By now the rain has become a "tempest" with a voice, and the speaker is reduced to a listener. The last word, "disappoint", is small and domestic for so vast a subject. Its dry understatement is more chilling than a grander word would be. Death is perfect only because it cannot let anyone down, and perfection defined as the absence of risk is a bleak idea. The hedge "If love it be" shows the speaker doesn't fully trust his own claim.
That doubt makes the poem significant. It offers no heroic death, no heaven, and no comfort. It stays with a mind that finds its only certainty in an ending. Yet the speaker's own prayer contradicts him. A man with "no love" left does not lie awake hoping his old loves are sleeping soundly. The poem's power lies in the gap between what he says he feels and what he does. Almost every word is plain and short, and nothing is dressed up, so when the claim is undercut we feel it as honesty.