Midnight in high summer, and the sky is crowded with rivals. Poe sets this scene in the first eight lines, and the whole poem grows out of it. The opening is a small paradox: "noontide of summer" and "midtime of night" sit side by side, so the vocabulary of heat and daylight is borrowed for the dead of night. The cause is the moon, whose glare is so strong that the stars "shone pale, through the light / Of the brighter, cold moon." Two things about her are already fixed, and they will not leave the poem: she is brighter, and she is cold.
Poe also gives the moon the manner of a tyrant. The planets are "her slaves," and she sits "Herself in the Heavens" while her beam lies on the waves, ruling sky and sea at once. Her brightness is more than decoration, because it actually dims everything around her. The speaker is looking at power, and he does not like it.
The form shifts as his attitude does. The first stanza runs on short, quick lines with two main beats each ("'Twas NOONtide of SUMmer"), a lilting rhythm in which only the second and fourth lines of each quatrain rhyme: night/light, slaves/waves. The second stanza breaks into indented tercets and the rhymes tighten: awhile/smile, shroud/cloud, star/afar, heart/part, admire/fire. The third line of each tercet answers the others at a longer reach, with me, thee and be, and then night and light. Those last two return to the sounds that closed the first stanza's quatrains. The poem ends in the same sounds it started with, but the values attached to them have flipped, and "light" now belongs to something "colder, lowly."
The turn comes in the middle. "I gazed awhile / On her cold smile" gives the moon a face, and a smile with no warmth in it. Then the speaker breaks off with "Too cold--too cold for me--," where the repetition and dashes sound like a shiver. A cloud passes "as a shroud," a burial image, as if the moon were briefly laid out like a corpse. Yet the cloud is "fleecy," a soft, woolly word that takes the edge off the death imagery. That pause lets the speaker leave. "I turned away to thee" moves from "her" to "thee," from description to direct address, and the star becomes someone he talks to.
What he admires in the star is the opposite of what the moon displays. The key word is "proud," which is applied to the star twice. Pride in this poem is not the moon's domineering display. The star has a "part" to bear in Heaven at night, a role it plays without enslaving anyone. Distance is the other quality he values: "afar," "distant fire." The line "dearer thy beam shall be" suggests the star grows more precious because it is far away. Even the contrast between "fire" and "light" matters, since fire warms and the moon's light only shines. Calling the moon "lowly" is a neat insult. She is nearer and brighter, but the speaker ranks her beneath the small, remote flame.
The central idea, then, is that admiration belongs to what glows from far away, not to what dazzles and dominates. The poem does not say what the star stands for. Judging by the personal "thee," it could be read as a beloved or as an ideal, but that is an inference, not something the text states. One extra detail is worth noticing. "Evening Star" is traditionally a name for Venus, which is a planet. If the speaker has Venus in mind, he admires one of the "planets" that the moon is supposed to rule, the one that refuses to behave like a slave.
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. A single contrast between two lights carries a whole attitude, and the sound patterns underline the change in feeling. Readers who know Poe for the gloom of "The Raven" or his horror tales will find the night sky treated differently here. It is a place for choosing what to love, though the word "shroud" shows his darker imagination still flickering at the edges.