Anne Brontë gives summer everything it could want: sun on "green fields and waving woods," "a sky of purest blue," flowers of "loveliest hue." Then her speaker closes her eyes on all of it. "But what were all these charms to me," she asks, once "one sweet breath of memory" drifts past? The first stanza sets up the poem's odd and appealing claim, that a remembered primrose "just opening into sight" can outshine a real landscape in full bloom. The rest of the poem tests that claim, first by praising Memory and then by asking whether Memory deserves the credit at all.
The form carries the argument quietly. Nearly every stanza follows a tail-rhyme pattern, aabccb, with four-beat lines broken by shorter three-beat ones such as "And soft winds wandered by." Those short lines work like small exhalations, and their shared rhyme ties each stanza together. In the long opening stanza of twelve lines, the same sound returns four times (by, eye, by, sky), so summer's breadth is echoed back to us. The word "by" is used first for the real wind and then for memory's breath, and only the second passing matters to the speaker. After that opening, the stanzas shrink to six lines each, as the poem's attention narrows from the whole sky to one small flower.
The flowers she chooses are modest ones: primrose, crocus, wall-flower, bluebell, daisy, buttercup. Memory is asked to "fill" the buttercup's "bright goblet," a neat image that turns the flower into a cup and Memory into what it holds. The repeated "Still" at the start of the lines ("Still make the golden crocus shine," "Still in the wall-flower's fragrance dwell") makes the address sound like a prayer, and anxiety runs beneath it. "Do not pass away," she begs, as if she fears the glow could fade. The plea widens to "sparkling frost," "wreathed snow," "wild winds" and "rippling waters," so that a childhood spent among the seasons seems to be lit from within. Her boldest line is "Nature's chief beauties spring from thee," which locates beauty in the remembering mind rather than the world.
Then she stops herself. "Is childhood, then, so all divine?" The little word "then" sounds like someone catching her own enthusiasm. Her answer is a double no. Childhood had "pangs of grief," and the bracketed aside ("Although, perchance, their stay be brief") does the work of a shrug before the sting of "bitter while they last." But Memory cannot claim all the credit either, because the "holy light" falls "on our earliest joys alone." The religious vocabulary of "divine," "haloes" and "holy" has been building all along, and here it is turned into a limit. Whatever "ray" lights those first pleasures, no "spell" of Memory's can make "our later pleasures shine, / Though long ago they passed."
That last word quietly answers the earlier plea. In the fifth stanza she begs Memory not to "pass away," and in the final line it is the later pleasures that have passed, beyond any rescue. The poem ends on a loss rather than a consolation. Memory can preserve, but it cannot make something new shine with the first light.
What gives the poem its interest is that it argues with itself. It begins as an ode to nostalgia and ends by declining the easy version of it. It does not pretend that childhood was painless, and it does not reduce childhood's brightness to a trick of looking back. Instead it suggests that first experience, the wonder of watching a primrose open for the first time, is a different kind of event from anything that follows. The plain vocabulary and tidy stanzas make the thought easy to follow, and the quiet sadness of the ending gives it weight. A reader may well finish it wondering which of their own memories glow because of the remembering and which glowed from the start.