Thoreau begins by throwing his books away, though with a book-lover's regret. "My books I'd fain cast off, I cannot read," he says, because his thoughts keep drifting "down in the meadow, where is richer feed." The grazing image turns the wandering mind into a grazing animal and the meadow into better pasture than the page. Plutarch, Homer and Shakespeare are granted their greatness, but with a sting: Shakespeare's books are worth reading only "unless his books were men." Writing matters, the speaker implies, as a record of living, and he would rather have the living itself.
What follows is the poem's best joke. Lying under a walnut bough, he finds the Trojan War going on at his feet. The ants on the "hummock's crown" fight "juster battles" than the Greeks and Trojans did, and he describes them in Homer's own vocabulary: a "phalanx," gods who favor "red or black" (presumably two colours of ant), and a lone "Ajax" straining "to heave some rock against the host." The tone is mock-heroic, but the mockery cuts both ways. The ants are made absurdly grand, yet he watches them with the full attention a reader gives an epic. There is also a neat irony here: he can see the ants as warriors only because he has read Homer. The books are not so much discarded as released into the grass.
Then comes the comic politeness of "Bid Homer wait" and "Tell Shakespeare to attend some leisure hour." The greatest writers in the language are treated like callers turned away at the door, because the speaker has "business with this drop of dew." The word "business" is wry, since his only work is lying still and looking.
The poem keeps lowering its viewpoint. His bed of "herd's grass and wild oats" was made "with nicer skill than monarchs use," the clover is his pillow, and the violets "overtop my shoes," which tells us how close to the ground he lies. When the rain arrives, the language softens. The clouds are "cordial," meaning warm and friendly (and perhaps hinting at a restoring drink, though that is only an inference), and the wind swells "to say all's well." The drops fall "fast and thin, / Some in the pool, some in the flower-bell," a line that spreads the rain evenly over the landscape.
The scale then shifts again. A single drop rolling down a stem becomes "a lonely planet," and in the next line it "sinks into my garment's hem." In four lines the poem moves from the cosmos to a patch of wet cloth. After this, sound takes over. "Drip drip" opens the ninth stanza, and the awkwardly inverted "The wind alone it is makes every sound" slows the line down, as if the speaker were holding his breath to listen. The rain "distills" richness from every bough and shakes down "crystals," so the wealth of monarchs is answered with water that looks like jewels.
The form is plain and relaxed. Ten quatrains rhyme ABAB, in mostly regular iambic pentameter that loosens now and then, much like a mind at ease. The diction has an old-fashioned, bookish flavor ("fain," "'Twixt," and "targe," an old word for a shield, which probably helps the rhyme with "large"). The poem therefore sounds literary even as it renounces literature. The last rhyme pair, "bough" and "below," matches more to the eye than the ear, a small roughness the poem does not worry about.
The ending is the most playful part. The sun "will never show himself," and the speaker scolds him, since sunbeams could never "melt me so" as the rain has. With his "dripping locks" he looks like an elf "in a beaded coat." He began as a reader and ends as a creature of the meadow, dressed in dew, and the beaded coat answers the monarchs' finery.
The poem matters because it argues for direct attention and acts out the argument. Readers who know Thoreau for *Walden* will recognize the idea that a small, closely observed piece of the world can be worth more than inherited authority. Here that idea arrives with humor and without sermonizing, and it leaves Homer and Shakespeare enriching the afternoon rather than being cast off.