Four short lines, no capital letters, no punctuation, and the title "Dusk" is the only thing telling us what we are looking at. That matters, because the first line never names its subject: "full of land as a mole." Whatever is full of land is left for the reader to decide. Dusk is the natural candidate. It is the hour when hills, fields and tree lines thicken into a single dark mass and the earth seems to crowd out the sky. A mole is an apt comparison for that. It lives underground, comes up smeared and heavy with soil, and carries the ground around on its body. The evening, the poem suggests, is loaded with earth in the same way.
Then the second line turns: "done in with war." The idiom "done in" means exhausted, but it can also mean killed, and the poem lets both meanings hang. The line is the shortest in the poem, four syllables against six in each of the others, and it drops like something set down because it is too heavy to carry. No war is named, and the poem gives no reason to look for a particular one. Still, the mole image fits the vocabulary of conflict: burrowing, hiding, living in the dirt. Grammatically, "done in with war" could describe the mole, the dusk, or the day itself. That ambiguity is the point. The tired, ground-down creature and the tired, ground-down evening become one figure.
The second stanza steps back from the picture and looks forward: "how much this day will rust / in the country of night." There is no question mark, so we cannot tell whether this is a real question, an exclamation or a sigh. The verb is what makes the image. Rust belongs to iron left out in the weather, and the day becomes a piece of metal, perhaps armour or a tool, that is about to be abandoned. The word also does colour work. Rust is the orange-brown of a late sunset, so the line is both a decay image and a description of the sky. The future tense matters too. The damage hasn't happened yet. Dusk is the moment just before the long exposure of night begins.
"Country of night" echoes "land" from the first line and widens the scale. A mole's patch of soil has become a nation, and countries are exactly what wars are fought over. Night is imagined as a territory with its own borders, one the day must cross into and be corroded by. The poem moves from the animal to the landscape to the map, and the war that was only hinted at in line two gets a faint geography.
The sound of the poem supports this. Nothing rhymes, but several words share the same dull, short vowel: "done," "much," "rust," "country." Said aloud, they sound thick and muffled, like speech in a tired mouth. Against them, "full," "mole" and "land" give the opening line a rounder, softer feel. The rhythm is mostly steady. "How much this day will rust" falls into a plain pattern of alternating stresses, a measured, walking pace. The absence of punctuation lets each phrase lean in more than one direction. "War" ends the first stanza without a full stop, so it seems to bleed into the white space before the second.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves unsaid. It never tells us whether the war is real or a metaphor for the way a hard day grinds a person down, and it doesn't need to. Because the two readings sit on top of one another, an ordinary event, the sky darkening at the end of a day, picks up the weight of exhaustion and violence without any explanation. A reader finishes it with a question the poem leaves open: what in a day, or in a country, will be left out in the dark long enough to rust?