Four short lines, no punctuation, and two scenes that seem to belong to different worlds. In the first couplet someone walks out of doors, "going with the sun / into the street." In the second the same person, now saying "I," drinks "like a scholar / at the burial of a book." One image is bright, public and moving. The other is hushed, ceremonial and a little mournful. The poem never says how they connect, and that gap is where most of its meaning sits.
The title offers the first clue. A "campaigner" is someone who goes out to push for something, whether in politics, in a cause, or in the older sense of a soldier on campaign. The word suggests purpose and motion, and the opening lines fit it. "Going with the sun" has no subject and no fuss, just the present participle carrying the speaker forward. The sun can be read as a companion, a mandate, or simply the daylight that makes public action possible. It is also ambiguous. The speaker might be following the sun at dawn or chasing it westward, and the poem doesn't say which. The street, meanwhile, is the ordinary stage for any campaign, the opposite of the study or the library.
Then comes the turn. "I drink like a scholar" is a strange simile, because the speaker is not a scholar. They only drink like one. The verb works two ways. It can mean taking a drink at a wake, which suits a burial. It can also mean drinking in, absorbing greedily, the way a scholar takes in a text. Both meanings fit, and neither cancels the other. The "burial of a book" is stranger still. Is a book being mourned, as at a funeral? Or is it being put to rest because its ideas have finally left the page and gone out into the street? Perhaps the campaigner has stopped reading and started acting, and the scholarly part of them is holding a small wake for what has been left behind. The poem leaves that choice open.
The construction is as spare as the content. There is no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation. By my count the lines run five syllables, four, six and eight, so the poem lengthens as it goes and the last line is the heaviest and slowest. Three of the four lines end on a single stressed syllable: "sun," "street" and "book." Each lands like a footstep or a closing lid. The exception is "scholar," whose soft, trailing ending makes the one line about reading the least conclusive of the four. The compression recalls haiku, with its pairing of two images and the space between them, though the poem doesn't follow a 5-7-5 pattern. The sounds quietly link the halves too. The hard k in "drink," "like" and "book" gives the second couplet a clipped, dry texture against the open vowels of "going" and "into."
The lack of punctuation also lets the grammar spill over the stanza break. Read straight through, "going with the sun / into the street / I drink like a scholar" becomes one continuous sentence, so the speaker walks out and drinks at the same moment. The street and the burial are not separate scenes in sequence. They happen together, as if the funeral were taking place in the open air, under that same sun. The campaigner carries the library's death with them into the daylight.
That is what makes the poem worth reading closely. It sets two ways of living against each other, the active and the contemplative, light and earth, the street and the page, and it refuses to say which wins. It could be a celebration of leaving books behind for action, or a quiet elegy for the reflection that action costs. Light touches of irony, like a scholar's thirst turning up at a graveside, keep it from being either solemn or smug. In very few words it asks a question every committed person faces: when you go out to change things, what do you bury along the way, and do you drink to it or mourn it?