Six short lines, and the loneliest thing in them is a title. "Drinking alone beneath the sun" sets the scene before the poem proper begins: one person, open daylight, a drink. The title announces the solitude so plainly that the lines beneath it never need to repeat it. They show what solitude feels like from the inside. The central idea is that a person can be surrounded by pleasant things, like warmth, water and a bright day, and still feel the lack of the one thing that would make them matter. The speaker asks for "a change," but what he actually names as missing is company.
The first stanza is built from the plainest materials: "water and sun." The phrase sounds like the start of an inventory, and it stays that elemental. Then comes a small act of personification: these two are "friends of drink." It's a telling choice. A speaker with human friends nearby wouldn't need to adopt the weather and a glass as companions. Because there is no punctuation, the line can be read as a description of water and sun, or as a direct address to them. That ambiguity pushes the poem toward the second reading, where the speaker is talking to what is in front of him. The final line, "promise me a change," is half command and half plea. Water moves and the sun travels across the sky, so they are natural symbols of change, though that is an inference from the imagery. The poem doesn't explain it. What stays with us is the oddness of asking elements for a promise. People who are heard by other people don't usually ask the sun for reassurance.
The second stanza turns from what surrounds him to what is absent. "I miss joy" is the bluntest line in the poem: three monosyllables and the only plain statement of feeling, with no ornament and no explanation. It comes after the "water and sun" lines like an admission that the outer scene was never the real subject. Then the poem becomes concrete. Joy is abstract, but "idle talk / in the garden" is something we can picture. The word "idle" matters here. It means unhurried and unpurposeful, talk that exists only for its own sake. It also quietly mirrors the speaker's present situation, since drinking in the sun is an idle activity too. The difference is that idleness shared is joy and idleness alone is emptiness. The poem never says this outright, but the repeated word-world of leisure makes the contrast clear.
The poem also doesn't say where the garden is. It could be the place where he is sitting, now silent, or somewhere he has left, or a memory. Ending on a location instead of a feeling gives the last line a wistful, trailing quality, as if the mind has drifted off to a particular spot and stayed there.
Formally the poem is very economical. It is two tercets with no rhyme, no capital letters, no punctuation, and lines of only three to five syllables. The effect is of speech reduced to what it can't do without, close in compression to a haiku, though it follows no strict count. The sounds are soft: the nasal m and n in "promise me a change," "miss," and "garden," and the gentle d of "idle" and "garden," which give the ending a muffled, unhurried feel. Nothing is stressed or dramatized. The lack of rhyme matters too, because nothing in the poem is answered or closed off. "Change" never finds its echo, and "garden" simply stops.
That restraint is a large part of what makes the poem worth reading. It avoids self-pity and complains about nothing; it only says "I miss." The title recalls, perhaps deliberately, the old tradition of poems about drinking alone, though that is a guess from the wording and not something the poem confirms. Whatever its source, the poem shows how much feeling a few small words can hold. It makes loneliness something we notice in the gaps: in the objects addressed as friends, in the plea to a sun that cannot reply, and in a garden where the talk has gone quiet.