Most poems praise a tree for being beautiful. Anne Finch's speaker begins by feeling she owes it money. "'Tis just that some return be made," she says, and the vocabulary of the opening, "just," "return," "due," belongs more to a ledger than to a landscape. The central idea is gratitude as a real obligation. The tree has given shade, and a decent person pays back what she has been given.
The next ten lines show how everyone else settles the debt. Each visitor receives shelter and gives something in kind. The birds get a home and supply "music"; the travellers wait out a storm and spend the time "praising thee"; the shepherd, "from scorching freed," tunes his reed to the tree's "dancing leaves," while his sweetheart hangs flower garlands on the boughs. Everyone pays in what they do best, whether song, speech or flowers. The speaker's turn comes with a blunt question, "Shall I then only silent be?", and an equally blunt "No;" at the start of line 17. Her payment is the poem itself, and it takes the form of a wish: "still to flourish be thy fate."
That wish becomes the most interesting stretch of the poem. It is one long sentence, carried by a run of "Till" clauses, and it imagines the tree's whole future. The tree should stand "to future ages" and stay "untouch'd by the rash workman's hand." "Rash" is a pointed word. The danger is thoughtless cutting, not necessity. The tree should die only when its "large stock of sap is spent," which treats a natural end as something earned. Even then the speaker wants a particular kind of death. The "fierce winds, that vainly strive / To shock thy greatness whilst alive," get their chance only once the tree is already dying, and they "Prevent the axe" by felling it themselves. Old enemies become honour guards. They "call" their "scatter'd strength together" and "proclaim thy fall" to the clouds, as if announcing the death of a king. The clouds then stop sending "ev'ning dews," since the tree is "no longer" their "care." Even the weather seems to mourn.
The ending sharpens the heroic comparison. The tree will "like ancient heroes, burn," and "some bright hearth be made thy urn." The image moves from the battlefield pyre to the domestic fireplace in a single line. I read this as the poem's quiet joke and its final tenderness. The speaker has just asked that no workman touch the tree, yet it ends as firewood. But the tree's last act is the same as its first, giving comfort, now as warmth instead of shade. Wind brings it down rather than the axe, so its usefulness continues without violence.
The form suits this gentle, courteous tone. The poem runs in rhyming couplets of eight syllables, a short, neat line that clicks shut every two lines. Apostrophes such as "pow'r," "ev'ning" and "flow'ry" squeeze words into that rhythm. The couplets also reinforce the poem's theme of exchange, since each rhyme pairs a gift with its answer: "give" with "receive," "freed" with "reed," "spare" with "care." Some pairings no longer chime perfectly, such as "bestows" and "boughs," but the effect of balance survives. The decorative figures, the "nymph," the "chaplets," the reed-playing shepherd, come from the conventions of pastoral verse, and the diction and polished couplets suggest the early eighteenth century, though that is an inference from the style.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it uses those conventions. The tree is never treated as scenery or timber. It is a benefactor, something to be thanked, protected and mourned. The poet also admits her own position. She cannot shelter anyone or play a reed, so her contribution is words, and she offers them with real warmth. The result is a small poem with a surprisingly serious ethic: what nature gives us calls for something back, even if all we have to give is attention and a well-made wish.