Praising the sun is easy in June. Edward Thomas picks a harder moment: a November morning, "the year" already dying, and a speaker standing against a south wall to get warm. The poem's central idea grows out of that choice. The sun is not best in summer and merely tolerable later. Every day's sun is the best, because each one is different, and the speaker will go on saying so for as long as he lives.
The opening lines sound like a gentle generalisation, but they keep a sense of humour. The sun is "kind as it can be, this world being made so", a phrase that quietly admits the sun's kindness has limits. Then comes the catalogue: "stones and men and beasts and birds and flies". The repeated "and" makes the list sprawl democratically, and the poem lets "flies" drop in at the end, so the grand claim shrinks to something small and buzzing. The exception, "except snow", is nearly a joke. The sun's warmth is, after all, bad news for snow.
The poem then moves from the general to one particular spot. "The south wall warms me" is plain and bodily, and the colon after it leads into the November scene. The last damsons fall "with spangles of the morning's storm" when a starling shakes the bough. "Spangles" turns leftover rain into glitter, which is exactly what sunlight does to water. The starling is "whistling what / Once swallows sang", and the line break leaves "what" hanging as if the bird were reaching for a half-remembered tune. The swallows have gone, so the summer song survives only as an echo. Judging by the imagery, even this dying season is full of borrowed, lingering beauty.
Then comes the turn: "But I have not forgot". The speaker catches himself overpraising November and corrects the record, though not by taking anything back. He tumbles through the months, "March's sun, / Like April's, or July's, or June's, or May's". The deliberately jumbled order makes it sound like someone rummaging through memory, not reciting a calendar. By the time he reaches "August, September, October, and December", the line is too long for its pentameter and spills over, as if there are simply too many good days to fit. It also quietly names every month, with November, the one he is standing in, left for the next line. The paradox is in the phrase "equal days, all different from November". They are equal in worth and different in kind, which is why the same sentence can be true every time.
The rhyme scheme works in the same spirit. The opening has a tidy *abab* pattern, but after that the rhymes scatter: "town" is answered by "down" four lines later, and "begun" by "sun" six lines on. Couplets such as "now/bough" and "what/forgot" turn up unpredictably. The chiming returns after a delay, like the seasons themselves. The finale tightens into an enclosing pattern, with "said" and "dead" framing "say" and "to-day".
The ending changes the poem's mood. "No day of any month but I have said— / Or, if I could live long enough, should say" is a small, wistful admission. The speaker cannot say the sentence on every day because he does not have enough days. Then the quoted words, "There's nothing like the sun that shines to-day", are followed by a last line that repeats them with a new ending: "till we are dead". That line is almost entirely made of one-syllable words and gives no consolation. Some readers will hear a claim that the sun is unmatched until death, and others a hint that nothing follows. Knowing that Thomas himself died in the First World War, in 1917, may tempt a reader to hear more in the line. That is a reading from outside the text, though. The poem needs no help to make death present.
What makes the poem significant is how it turns a cliché into an argument. Loving sunshine is ordinary, but loving it in November, and then insisting on the same love for every month, is a way of paying attention. The conversational voice, the sly humour and the plain diction keep the poem from sounding like a lecture. By the end, it has shown that praise does not wear out if it is made fresh each morning, and that the limit on such praise is the number of days we are given.