A man with a hump, no money and a coat far too big for him sounds like the opening of a sad story. Edward Thomas turns it into ten lines of cheerful rattling along. The poem is about the gap between how a person looks from outside and how life feels from inside. Its central idea is that happiness doesn't check anyone's list of deficiencies first.
The first stanza is that list, delivered with a passerby's frankness. The huxter, a small travelling trader, is first just "He", someone seen and sized up. The comparison "a hump like an ape on his back" is blunt, even unkind. Then comes the wry joke "of money a plentiful lack", where the awkward word order and the paradox of "plentiful lack" make poverty sound like a grand inheritance. The last two lines are the funniest. Apart from "a gay coat of double his girth", he is the plainest thing on earth. "Gay" here means bright and showy, so we picture a small bent man swamped in loud cloth, the one cheerful thing about him. The tone teases without ever turning cruel, and that balance matters for what happens next.
The form carries much of the meaning. Each stanza has four lines in rhyming couplets (back/lack, girth/earth, beer/near, hump/bump), followed by a short refrain line, "This fine May morning." The four long lines gallop, with stresses tumbling over quick unstressed syllables, so the rhythm feels like a cart jogging down a track. The refrain then slows to a few heavy, spaced-out beats, like a pause to look around. Its words are identical in both stanzas, but their effect changes. In the first stanza the fine morning sits oddly beside all that lack. In the second it belongs to the people on the cart.
The turn comes with "But", and Thomas signals it by repeating a pattern. In stanza one the verb is "has": "He has a hump", "He has of money a plentiful lack." In stanza two it is "has" again, but what the huxter has is "a bottle of beer", a cart and a wife. The first list was what he is missing, and the second is what he enjoys. He also finally gets his name, "the huxter", a trade and a place in the world rather than a pointing finger. His wife "sits near", and the closeness is in the plain wording. She "does not heed his lack or his hump", repeating the two items from the first stanza as things that simply don't register with her. "Heed" is a good choice of word, since it suggests she has seen them perfectly well and just doesn't give them weight.
The last rhyme is the cleverest. "Hump", the cruel word of the opening, now rhymes with "bump", and the bump belongs to the cart on the rutted lane. What looked like a deformity is absorbed into ordinary jolting, something the couple share and laugh at. The poem ends in laughter ("And they laugh as down the lane they bump"), and the verb is happily plain.
The poem doesn't stage a speech about contentment or tell us to feel sorry for the huxter or admire him. It simply moves from one kind of looking to another and lets us notice the difference. Our first impression, built from the speaker's inventory, turns out to be an outsider's mistake. The couple would not recognise themselves in it.
That is what makes this small piece worth reading. Edward Thomas is generally thought of as a poet of English lanes and country people, and this poem suggests the attention behind that reputation. It gives its attention to someone most passersby would glance at and forget. It does so lightly, with a nursery-rhyme bounce, and without false cheer or pity. The "fine May morning" costs nothing, and the poem suggests it may be the one kind of wealth the huxter and his wife have in full.