Nothing much happens in «Right then», and the poem seems perfectly aware of it. A speaker sits or stands outdoors early in the day, notices a few things, and decides that breakfast can wait until the sun climbs high enough. There is no plot and no announced moral. Even so, the small collection of observations makes a quiet case that paying attention to an ordinary morning is worth doing for its own sake, and that the natural world can set a person's schedule better than a watch can.
The opening shows how the poem works. "Crystal-clear air" promises the postcard version of dawn, and then the sentence swerves: the air "carries / a whiff of sewage." The line break helps with the joke. We hang for a moment on the graceful verb "carries" before the smell arrives. The poem declines to tidy up its landscape, and that honesty is what makes its later pleasures believable. Smell is the first sense to appear, and after that the poem is mostly about listening.
The birds are described in the language of human talk and trade. The indigo bunting and yellow warbler "trade songs," as if swapping goods across a fence. Then comes the deadpan aside "same syllable count." Judging by the form, this looks like a wink at haiku, where syllable-counting is famous. The poem's own three-line stanzas are small and haiku-like, but they don't follow a strict pattern. The second stanza itself runs roughly five, six and five syllables, close enough to tease the form without obeying it. The speaker seems to enjoy rules lightly.
Repetition gives the poem its rhythm. Stanza one opens "Cool morning." and stanza three opens "Chilly morning." The lines read like jottings in a field notebook, and the change from "cool" to "chilly" is telling. The air is getting colder to the speaker's skin, not warmer. The chipmunk, meanwhile, scolds from "a patch of sunlight" while the speaker evidently has none. That detail is an inference from the text, but it gives the last stanza a bodily reason as well as an aesthetic one. The sounds stay busy too, with the clustered *ch* of "chilly," "chipmunk" and "patch," and the hard *c* of "crystal-clear" and "carries."
The fourth stanza is the funniest. "One drums, the other yammers" gives the two pileated woodpeckers a percussionist and a chatterbox. Then the idiom "agree / to disagree" is split across the line break, so the word "agree" ends one line and its opposite begins the next. The stanza acts out its own joke. The birds become two neighbours in a friendly, permanent argument, and the speaker is the amused eavesdropper. Calling them "the pileateds," in the shorthand of someone who knows them, suggests familiarity without any need to say so.
Only in the final stanza does the speaker appear as "I." Until then the poem has been all ears and eyes, a personality made entirely of attention. The ending is deliberately plain: "When the sun clears the top / of the tall maple / I'll go get breakfast." The line break after "top" lifts the sentence the way the sun lifts, and the last line is flat, ordinary and satisfying. The title now comes into focus. "Right then" can be the phrase you say to yourself before getting up, and it can also mean "at that very moment." The speaker will act at the moment the sun clears the maple, not before.
The poem matters because it does so much without raising its voice. It doesn't pretend nature is purely beautiful, and it doesn't claim a great revelation. It offers smell, birdsong, cold and light, a little humour, and a decision small enough to be believable. For students, it shows that a poem can be built from close noticing and well-placed line breaks. It also suggests that an hour spent listening can be time well used.