Almost nothing happens in "Today." A speaker gets home, sits down, watches the moonlight, goes to bed and dreams. The one thing the poem never tells us is what actually happened during the day. That silence is the key to it. The poem is less about an event than about its aftermath, the moment when the noise stops and a day, good or bad, finally catches up with you. Its central idea is that contentment and melancholy can live in the same evening. The speaker sighs "contentedly" and a line later admits to being "melancholy about today," and cannot explain the contradiction: "And I wonder why..."
The construction makes this stuckness audible. On the page the poem is a single block of twelve lines, but its rhymes divide it into three quatrains. In each, the even lines end on the long "ay" sound: "stay," "today," "rays," "today," "lay," "today." The odd lines pair up more loosely, with "home" and "alone" sharing a long vowel and "sigh/why" and "bed/head" rhyming outright. The word "today" closes each quatrain like a refrain, so the day literally has the last word three times. Because the "ay" sound recurs in every second line, the poem feels like walking around a room and ending up at the same spot each time.
The rhythm supports this. Lines are short, mostly four to seven syllables, and many begin with a stressed word followed by a falling pattern: "Sitting at home," "Quiet, alone." The effect is a lulling, slightly drowsy pulse, closer to a murmur than to a song. The poem also leans on adverbs ending in "-ly," and they trace the evening's progress. First comes "finally," the relief of arriving. Then "contentedly," the settling in. Then "wearily," the body giving up, and "silently," the last stage before sleep. Each word is slower and more muted than the one before, so the vocabulary itself winds down like a dimming light.
Just as telling are the participles that open so many lines: "Sitting," "Reminiscing," "Watching," "Having," "Remembering." They describe states, not actions. The speaker does almost nothing but sit, look and remember, and the grammar leaves them suspended. Even "Finally there to stay" has an odd weight. It could mean cosy relief, but "to stay" also sounds like the end of movement, a door closing on the day.
The imagery is sparse. The only picture of the outside world is "the last moon's rays." The word "last" does quiet work here. The light is thinning, and so is the day the speaker cannot let go of. Notice, too, that the speaker watches this light without describing any colour or detail, as though looking at it but seeing something else. The ellipsis after "why" works the same way. The sentence trails off exactly where an explanation should begin.
The ending brings the poem back to its start. In the first quatrain the speaker is "Reminiscing about today"; in the last they are "Remembering today," now inside dreams "within my head." Sleep, which we expect to be an escape, becomes another place where the day replays. The final line also names no feeling at all, only the act of remembering, as though memory itself is the emotion. One small quirk is worth noticing. In the present tense, "I lay" should strictly be "I lie," and the rhyme with "today" seems to pull the grammar into shape. It is a minor slip, but it shows how strongly the "ay" sound governs the poem.
The poem's significance lies in its modesty and honesty. It doesn't dramatise a big emotion. It captures a small, familiar one, the vague wistfulness of an evening after a day that mattered, and it trusts readers to supply their own "today." That openness is also its limit, because without a single concrete detail the mood stays general. Even so, it is a neat example of how repetition, rhyme and slowing language can make a reader feel a thought going round and round, which is exactly what the speaker experiences.