Morning, in this poem, is given a strange job: it is a "sober ointment." The two words pull in different directions. An ointment soothes; you rub it into something sore. "Sober" strips out any sweetness and suggests clear-headedness, seriousness, the opposite of intoxication. The morning heals, then, but without flattery. It brings the relief of seeing plainly after a night of something blurrier. Even the sound of the line is balm-like, with its soft m and n and the long o shared by "sober" and "ointment."
The second line arrives with no capital letter, no question mark and no full stop: "who understands the world at first sight." Is it a question, asking who could possibly do that? Or is "who" the morning itself, personified as a mind that grasps everything in one glance? The poem doesn't settle it, and that ambiguity matters. Read as a rhetorical question, the line expects the answer "nobody." Read as a description of morning, it voices a hope that some clear light exists that can take in the whole world at once. Either way, "first sight" sets up a standard of instant understanding that the rest of the poem quietly undoes.
The second half turns to memory, as the title promises. "I remember a thin hard season" is built from the plainest words available, and the adjectives are physical rather than emotional. "Thin" suggests scarcity, and "hard" suggests something you could knock your knuckles against. The poem never says what kind of season this was or why it was lean, and it would be a mistake to fill that gap with a particular event. What we get is a texture, and the s and n sounds of "thin" and "season" thread through the phrase like a held breath.
Then comes the detail the memory has kept: "people in the streets." Nothing more is said. We are not told whether they were celebrating, protesting or simply walking. The speaker admits as much: "but I did not understand them." This is where the poem's two halves collide. The word "understands" in line two returns, negated, as "understand," and the confident idea of seeing the world at first sight meets a speaker who looked at a street full of people and could not read them. The "but" carries the whole weight of that disappointment.
The ending slows down. "Singing" gets a line to itself, and the isolation turns the word into a sound heard from a distance. Because it stands alone, we can't tell whether the people are singing or the speaker is, perhaps in the present, perhaps in the memory. The final line, "in a sort of haze," is just as slippery. The haze could cling to the crowd, to the singing, or to the speaker's own perception. The vague phrase "a sort of" admits that the memory is blurred, and even the word for the blur is imprecise. Set against "sober" in the first line, the haze is the poem's counter-image: morning clears, but the remembered season stays foggy.
Structurally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no punctuation, and its lines shrink as it goes, from a full aphorism to a single word. That shrinking mimics fading memory, as if each recalled detail were thinner than the last. The white space between the three groups of lines works like the gaps between a thought, a memory and a confession.
The poem is worth reading because it is honest about the limits of understanding. It begins with a lovely, confident claim about morning, then lets one small, unresolved memory complicate it. Perhaps clear sight belongs only to mornings, and the past, however hard, can only be recollected, gathered up again piece by uncertain piece, which is what the title's word literally suggests. The poem's wisdom lies in leaving those pieces unexplained.