"Early days" is what people say when it is too soon to tell how things will turn out, and the phrase hangs over this short poem like a held breath. A speaker looks back on a time before the doctors had said the worst, when he drank to a woman, or to something larger that the pronoun "her" gestures toward, and quietly carried a sickness he did not yet want to discuss. The central idea is a kind of graceful, stubborn understatement: the poem toasts life and refuses to dramatise its own decline.
The first stanza sets two sources of light and moisture against everything that follows. "I drank to her sun / and to her body of water" works on two levels. To drink *to* something is to toast it, but the image of drinking sun and water suggests taking something in, being fed. The "her" is never explained. She could be a lover, or she could be the earth or the sea. Her "body of water" also quietly puts the human body into the poem, which prepares the ground for the doctors and the illness later on.
The second stanza turns to the speaker: "me in my dirt and my rot / my wandering and my idleness." The repeated "my" sounds almost proud, as if he is listing his possessions. Sun and water are what make things grow, and dirt and rot are what they grow in, so the pairing can be read as a small garden, with her providing the light and rain and him the compost. That reading makes his decay less shameful and more useful. The sound of the words supports it. "Dirt" and "rot" are short, heavy monosyllables, while "wandering" and "idleness" are longer and looser, and they drift. There is also a link between "water" in the first stanza and "wandering" in the second, as though his aimless movement were a kind of flowing. Judging by the word "recovery" in the next stanza, a reader might even hear a hint of drinking problems behind "drank" and "idleness," though the poem never says so. That is a possibility it leaves open and does not insist on.
The third stanza brings in the cold, official language of medicine: "not yet declared by the doctors / to be past recovery." After the earthy, elemental words, "declared" sounds like a legal ruling or a judge's sentence. The key word is "yet." It tells us the speaker's perspective is retrospective, since he knows something the earlier self did not. The past tense ("drank," "was") confirms this. The verdict arrives somewhere beyond the edge of the poem, and its shadow falls backward over the warm opening lines.
The final stanza is the only one with three lines, and it holds the poem's quiet punch: "it was little yet / and bad to make a show / about the illness." "Little" is a plain, almost childlike word for something so serious, and "bad" does the same work. It means something like bad form, bad manners, a lapse of taste. The speaker's reticence feels like a code of conduct, a belief that you do not make a fuss. It is also telling that "illness" is the last word of the poem and the only time the sickness is named outright. The poem practises the restraint it describes by holding the word back until the end and then saying it without ornament.
Formally, the poem is free verse. It has no rhyme and no punctuation, and the only capital is the pronoun "I". The absence of full stops lets the stanzas run into one another with a conversational, unforced feel, like someone thinking aloud. The lines are short, mostly four to eight syllables, which gives the voice a measured, almost hushed pace. A faint consonance also threads through the middle of the poem: "drank," "dirt," "declared," "doctors." The hard *d* sounds seem to knock on the same door from start to finish.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little space: gratitude, self-deprecation, fear, and good manners, all without a single exclamation. It shows that restraint can be a way of feeling deeply. By the end, the toast of the opening has changed. It is no longer simply a celebration but also a farewell, the more moving because the speaker never says so.