A flower cannot walk away, and that simple fact drives every line of this small drama. The speaker is a flower addressing a butterfly. The title, "Hugo's 'flower to butterfly'," credits Victor Hugo with the idea, so Field's poem seems to be a version or adaptation of something Hugo wrote, though the text works perfectly well as a self-contained scene. The flower begs the butterfly to stay, and underneath the plea lies the poem's central idea: love between the free and the fixed is unequal. One partner can roam, and the other can only "watch and wait."
The form suits that gentle sadness. Six quatrains rhyme on their second and fourth lines (tether/together, dripping/sipping, humming/coming), and the lines alternate between roughly eight and seven syllables. Many of the rhymed endings are "feminine," with a soft unstressed final syllable, so each stanza seems to fall away rather than land hard. The first and third lines don't rhyme with each other, but the poet fills the gap with internal echoes: "knew it was not dew," "fate to watch and wait," "sight with tender light," "give me wing, thou beauteous thing." These give the verse a lilt like a half-remembered song. The effect is delicate, and it makes the flower's pain sound all the more helpless.
The best image comes in the second stanza. The butterfly has visited each morning "to sip the sweets / With which you found me dripping," never realising that "it was not dew / But tears." The flower's sweetness and sorrow are the same liquid, and the visitor enjoys one without noticing the other. That small piece of dramatic irony explains the whole relationship. The butterfly takes pleasure, and the flower takes the hurt.
Word choice sharpens the contrast between them. The butterfly is "wanton," a word that suggests restless, careless roving, and it "gambol[s] over honey meads." Those meadows are crowded with rivals, since the "siren bees" are humming there. A siren lures, and the word hints at danger as well as temptation, as if the flower fears the butterfly may be led astray. The flower's own verbs are all stillness: "bide," "dwell," "rest," "nestled." Even its home is described as "quiet heather," a deliberate foil to the humming meadows.
The argument builds like a persuasive speech. The flower tries guilt (the tears), then jealousy, then a warning: "The sunshine that delights you now / Shall fade to darkness gloomy." Here the flower is offering shelter, with a hint that freedom has an evening. Then comes the bribe in stanza five: the flower's "enraptured blooming" will fill the butterfly's sight "with tender light" and its wings "with sweet perfuming." Notice that love is promised as a service, a kind of beauty treatment for the visitor.
The word "tether" in the opening stanza is quietly ironic. The flower wants love to be a rope, though it is already tied to the ground by its roots. The last stanza pulls that irony into the open. After "Or, if you will not bide with me," the flower stops asking the butterfly to give up the sky and asks for the sky itself: "give me wing... / That we may soar together." Both the first and last stanzas end on "together," but one verb changes. "Dwell" becomes "soar," and the whole poem turns on that swap.
That turn is what makes the poem worth reading. The wish cannot be granted, because a flower will never fly, so the poem ends in longing rather than resolution. The flower begins by trying to keep another creature close and finishes by admitting that what it really wants is to be free of its own limits. A simple nature fable becomes an honest portrait of what loving someone who can leave feels like.