The speaker goes to a well to watch a king touch the sick. "The king's evil" was an old name for scrofula, a disease people once believed a monarch's touch could cure. The scene is plain and a little bleak: poor people stand all morning in the rain, waiting for a miracle.
The speaker doesn't tell us what they think of the ritual. There is no cheering and no scorn, only a watchful, quiet stance. What the speaker does notice is the wind moving through the corn, which, in the poem's last lines, changes "all remembrance / into country." That image suggests that the landscape slowly absorbs human events, even grand or strange ones like a king's healing. The ceremony will fade, and the land will remain.
The mood is hushed, damp, and humble. The poem seems to set royal power and human hope against something older and larger: weather, crops, and the steady passing of memory.