Four times Riley begins a stanza with the same plain, fairy-tale sentence: "There was a cherry-tree." The past tense is the first thing to notice. It makes the poem an act of looking back, and it leaves a small question hanging: is the tree still standing, or only the memory of it? By the final stanza the poem has decided that the difference matters less than the gratitude.
The opening stanza admits the loss. The blossoms are "bloomy snows," a cool image that soothes a "fevered sight," which "knows / No more its airy visions of pure joy." The fever might be illness, but judging by the imagery it reads more like the heat and strain of grown-up looking, an eye that has lost its ease. The speaker addresses "you," reminding someone of what they felt "when you were a boy." The poem begins as a gentle nudge to an adult who has forgotten.
The second stanza brings in the bluejay, and with it the poem's most interesting comparison. The bird seemed "blue as jet," but jet is black. For the child's eye the blue was so deep it nearly crossed into darkness. Then comes the shock of the exclamation: "Whoever knew / He was so pale a blue!" The broken dashes make the speech stumble, as if the speaker has only just noticed how far memory and present sight have drifted apart.
In the third stanza the pronouns shift. The distant "you" becomes "our child-eyes," and the speaker joins the person he was addressing. What they saw was a "miracle": white blossom thawing "into a crimson fruitage." The snow metaphor holds to the end, so winter turns to summer within a single image. The cherries are "far too sweet / But for a boy to eat," a line that makes sweetness almost too much for anyone but a child, and suggests that the capacity for joy belongs to childhood.
Then the last stanza reverses the poem. "There was" stops subtracting and starts adding. Tree, bloom, boy and bluejay are stacked up like gifts, each with its own "There was," and the speaker commands, "give thanks and joy!" Here the rhyme matters. "Joy" and "boy" closed the first stanza, when joy was something the eye no longer knew. They come back together at the end, and this time the joy is present. The bluejay is now "of the realest blue," a child's superlative that undoes the "pale a blue" of stanza two. The final line, "fruit for both of you," is pleasingly open. It plainly includes the boy and the bird, sharing one abundance, and it may also include the grown reader who has been addressed all along.
The form supports this. Each stanza is two rhymed couplets, and each follows the same pattern: three ten-syllable lines, then a short six-syllable one. That short line works like a soft landing, or a held breath let go: "As when you were a boy." "But for a boy to eat." The rhymes are mostly full, though "sat" and "jet" only just meet, which may be a small echo of a stanza about things not matching up. The vocabulary stays simple and the colours are bold and elemental: white, blue, crimson.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. The repeated line is word-for-word identical at the start and at the end, yet it carries different weight each time, first as loss, finally as celebration. The poem also does not rush to comfort. It lets the blue go pale and the vision fade before it offers thanks, so the gratitude feels earned rather than assumed. For a student, it is a clear lesson in how a refrain can change meaning without changing a single word, and how a nostalgic poem can avoid sentimentality by being honest about what time takes.