Anne Brontë opens by thanking God, then spends most of the poem working out what exactly she is thankful for. The occasion is one February day, and the circumstances are plain. She is alone, the people she loves are far away, and the sun falls on "withered grass" while the wind blows "fresh and free". It is a modest, wintry scene, yet it sets off a joy so strong that she prays its "memory" will "never pass away". The poem is that memory, written down to hold the feeling in place.
The first half works by elimination. Again and again she asks what caused her happiness and rejects the answer. It was not the "smile of early spring", which was "sweet" but could not "raise my spirit so". It was not a "feeling of delight, / All vague and undefined". It was not a "sanguine view of life" or a "hope of bright prosperity", and the exclamation "O no, it was not this!" sounds almost impatient. The list moves steadily inward and upward, from weather to mood to worldly optimism, until it reaches "a glimpse of truth divine". Having cleared away every ordinary explanation, the speaker makes the religious one feel earned rather than assumed. There is a quiet irony too. The sun she set aside in the opening stanza comes back transformed as "a ray of light / That shone direct from heaven", as if the light on the grass had been a rehearsal for the spiritual kind.
The form is as unfussy as the scene. After the eight-line opening, most stanzas are quatrains that alternate eight- and six-syllable lines, a shape close to a hymn, and they rhyme on the second and fourth lines: "glow" with "so", "concealed" with "revealed", "divine" with "mine". The rhymes are simple and sometimes loose. "Given" and "heaven" are a near-rhyme, and "die" sits only loosely against "immortality". That plainness suits a speaker who calls her experience "deep and strong" and doesn't try to decorate it. The longer opening stanza gives the scene room to breathe before the short, pointed questions tighten the pace.
Once the answer arrives, the verbs take over: "I felt", "I saw", "I saw", "I knew", "I longed". The repetition makes the revelation sound like something experienced rather than something taught. Light and darkness carry the argument. God's providence has been "in darkness long concealed" and is now "graciously revealed". She sees God's glory "most throughout the moral world", not only in nature, so what moves her seems to be less the view than a sense that the world is ordered and merciful. The pivotal moment is a denial: "I did not tremble at his power, / I felt that God was mine." Awe is there, since she "wondered and adored", but fear is not. "Mine" is the smallest and boldest word in the poem, because it turns a distant, all-powerful God into a personal one. The next stanza repeats the move with "I did not fear to die."
The final stanza echoes the Bible. "I knew that my Redeemer lived" recalls the words of Job, and "which eye hath never seen" recalls Paul's letter to the Corinthians. The poem closes on longing rather than satisfaction. The day was only a "glimpse", and the last line, "Without the veil between", admits that something still hangs between her and what she wants to see. A poem that began by asking for a memory to stay ends by looking past the memory altogether.
That honesty is what makes the poem worth reading. Anne Brontë, who also wrote novels, gives faith here as joy rather than anxiety. It is a feeling she tests, questions and refuses to inflate, and she writes it in a voice with no ornament to hide behind. Its drama lies in the way she discards explanations until only one is left, and in the plain statement that on an ordinary day, alone, she felt that God was hers.