Four short lines, and the weather arrives before any person does. "Hard rain and wind / against the plague house" is all we see of the outside world: no town, no date, no named sickness, only a building under assault. The phrase "plague house" does a lot of quiet work. It suggests a place marked off from everyone else, somewhere people are shut in or shut away. The preposition "against" makes the storm sound like a siege, battering a structure that is already set against something worse. The sounds are heavy too. "Hard rain and wind" is built from four blunt, stressed words, and you have to lean on each one as you read, the way you lean into a gale.
Then the poem turns, with no "but" or "yet" to announce it. "I walk in so merry a company / I may die with laughing." The "I" is the first human presence, and the rhythm changes with him. The line about the company is long and loose, almost skipping. "So merry a company" rolls along on unstressed syllables where the opening had been stiff and clipped. The ear registers the shift from weather to warmth before the mind has worked out what it means. The poem has no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, so the gap between the two couplets is left for the reader to cross. That crossing is where much of the thinking happens.
The line break gives "I walk in" two possible meanings. Read on its own, it sounds like someone stepping out of the rain and into the plague house. The next words redirect it into an older idiom, walking *in company*, moving through the world alongside others. Both readings stay alive. Either the speaker enters a house that turns out to be full of cheer, or he travels through dangerous times with merry companions. The poem never says who they are. They could be fellow sufferers, friends, the dying, or the dead, or they could be imagined. Whoever they are, "company" is the opposite of the isolation that "plague house" promises, and the word carries the poem's whole argument for human fellowship. Boccaccio's *Decameron* is a famous example of the same instinct, with a group of friends telling stories to get through a plague.
The final line is the sharpest. "Die with laughing" is a cousin of the everyday exaggeration "I nearly died laughing," and in ordinary speech it is harmless. Inside this poem the idiom loses its safety. The title has already told us that death is real, and "may" turns the figure of speech into a genuine possibility. The choice of "with" over "of" is also telling. Laughter might be the cause of death, or it might simply be what is happening while death arrives. The line falls away on its soft last syllable, "laugh-ing," and nothing follows it, so joke and threat share one breath. This is gallows humour at its most compressed.
The second couplet also sounds older than the first. "So merry a company" and "die with laughing" have the cadence of earlier English, and the voice is at odds with the plain, modern-looking lowercase lines above it. The poem doesn't explain this, so it is only an inference from the diction. It may be a borrowed or imitated voice. Either way, the effect is of someone speaking across time, which suits the title. It says "a time of plague," not "the plague," and that indefinite article lets the poem sit in any century where people have been shut indoors listening to the weather.
That timelessness is much of its significance. The poem refuses the two easy responses to catastrophe, panic and solemnity. The laughter is not denial, because the rain is still hammering the walls and the word "die" is still on the page. It is not sentimental either, since the speaker never claims that merriment will save anyone. What he offers is smaller and more believable: in a shut-up house, with a storm outside and death a real possibility, people go on keeping each other company, and some of them find something funny. The poem makes this point in just a few words.