Swinburne never lets us forget the number nine. "Three times thrice" opens the poem and closes each of its three sections, and by the end it sounds less like arithmetic than like a drumbeat or a toast. It is a ritual way of saying "nine." It gives the child's age and turns a birthday into a ceremony. It also echoes the "three times three" of a cheer, which the last section seems to confirm when the speaker tells his heart to "Pledge" the child "in wine of song."
The occasion is simple. A boy is nine, and the speaker, who calls him "my king," wants to honour him. The poem tells us nothing about who the boy is or what he has done, and I won't guess. Its real subject is the speaker's devotion and the problem of expressing it. The first section is a gift-giver's dilemma. Neither earth nor sea has a "flower nor pearl of price" worthy of the child's forehead, and no honey, balm or spice will do. The answer comes with a shrug that is also a declaration: "Love can think of nought but love to bring." That is the central idea. Love is the only gift equal to the occasion, and the poem itself, a made thing of sound, is the offering.
The form carries the same idea. Each section is a miniature of eleven lines with only two rhyme sounds and a refrain, which in the first section rhymes abaB bab abaB. The first section rings the changes on "wing / sing / king / bring / spring" and "ice / price / spice / sacrifice / thrice." The second is harder still, with "slumber / Humber / umber / cumber / number" set against "trice / vice / slice / mice." Rhyming this densely is a show of skill, and a little like the gift the speaker says he lacks. If he cannot bring pearls, he can bring ingenuity. The refrain, three heavy monosyllables after long, flowing sentences, lands like a bell.
The imagery moves from cold to warmth. Winter in the first section is a bird with a "rough white wing" that "curdled" streams, a surprisingly unappetising word for ice. The second section is a catalogue of nine years of English weather. Frost "has fettered Thames and Tyne and Humber," fog grows "too thick for steel to slice," and cloud and mud soil the world with "grime and umber." The comparison "defaced as souls with vice" gives the dirty skies a moral stain. Then comes the wonderful bathos of ships and chariots "trapped like rats or mice." Perhaps the poet is half-smiling here, aware of his own extravagance. All this misery is measured out "Since my king first smiled," so the child's smile is placed against a bleak, grinding world.
The third section turns the heat up. Even "the lands of palm and date and rice" do not "glow more bright" or "laugh more light" than the child. His eyes only have to be "beheld" once to "set thy joy-bells going." The verbs here are chiming and shining ones, and the line "Noon and eve and midnight and cock-crowing" piles up its "and"s until the praise covers every hour of the day. The closing "clarions blowing" gives the king his fanfare.
The rhythm helps the change of mood. The first section's lines are tight and weighty, with hard stresses in "Three times thrice hath winter's rough white wing." In the second and third sections the lines lengthen and many end on an unstressed syllable, as in "slumber," "flowing" and "going." The effect is of the verse swelling and rolling forward, like the celebration it describes. Alliteration and quick repeated "and"s, as in "Shone and waned and withered in a trice," make time seem to hurry past.
The poem matters less for any grand statement than for how it handles a small occasion. A child's birthday is a slight theme, and Swinburne meets it with all his skill in rhyme and refrain. The poem shows how strict form can hold a simple feeling: the repeated refrain keeps returning to one fact, that the child is nine, while the language reaches for kings, pearls and clarions. The extravagance is partly the point, since the poet says that no gift is large enough and then spends three roundels trying anyway.