Swinburne opens with a question that turns out to be a clever trick. "Heart's ease or pansy, pleasure or thought, / Which would the picture give us of these?" Heart's ease is an old name for the pansy, and "pansy" itself comes from the French *pensée*, "thought". So the poet sets two names for one flower against each other, one suggesting pleasure and the other thought, and asks which the painting offers. The reply comes almost before the question has finished: "Surely the heart that conceived it sought / Heart's ease." In eleven short lines the poem argues that a picture of flowers is more than decoration. It is a kind of medicine, made by one heart for another.
The title credits the picture to Fantin, presumably the French painter Fantin-Latour, known for his flower pieces. The poem does not list petals or colours, though. All we get is "deep flowers, with lustre and darkness fraught" and a glass vase "that gleams as the chill still seas". That is enough to suggest bright blooms against a shadowy ground, and the phrase "lustre and darkness" makes the comfort feel earned rather than sugary. The flowers are not cheerful in a simple way. They glow out of gloom, which is exactly what a "heart distraught" might need to see.
The poem's shape is its most striking feature. Every one of its eleven lines ends on one of just two sounds: the hard *-ought* of "thought", "sought", "wrought", "fraught" and "distraught", and the soft *-ease* of "these", "degrees", "disease", "seas" and "ease". The repetition feels like a soothing refrain, a phrase turned over again and again, and it gives the poem a lulling, almost incantatory quality. The refrain itself is tiny. "Heart's ease" appears at the start of the poem and then closes the first and last stanzas as a two-syllable line, like a held breath or a sigh of relief. The second stanza has no such line, but it ends on "disease", and the cure is hidden inside the word. Dis-*ease* rhymes with ease, and the rhyme quietly shows comfort sitting within the trouble it answers.
Swinburne's rhythm helps. The long lines have a lilting, rolling beat, as in "Heart's ease or pansy, pleasure or thought", and the refrain cuts it off so that the poem keeps arriving at rest. Within that music, small word-choices matter. The word "wrought" ends one line and begins the next ("the hand that wrought / Wrought comfort here"), as though the poem's grammar were making something with the painter's hand, the repeated word working like a second stroke of the brush. "Surely" appears twice, and it sounds both confident and a little pleading, since the speaker can only guess at the artist's intention. In the last stanza the flowers "lean and lend", a soft pair of words that suggests blooms bending over the rim of the glass while also giving something away. "Fraught" and "distraught" echo each other too. The flowers are laden with lustre and darkness, and the human heart is laden with trouble. Seeing one meets the other.
The poem also traces a chain of hearts. First there is the painter's heart, which "conceived" the work. It "impels" the hand, the hand makes the picture, and the picture finally reaches the viewer's heart. Art here is a form of passed-on care, and the process is "glad and divine", which suggests the making is as healing as the looking.
That is where the poem's significance lies. It is a small piece of writing about a picture, and it does what it describes. A painting of flowers can offer a quiet cure, and a poem of repeated sounds and a gentle refrain can offer one as well. Swinburne does not argue about whether art should provide pleasure or provoke thought. By making the pansy's two names one flower, he lets the two ideas meet, and the poem comes down on the side of comfort.