Waiting is usually the dull part of life, the stretch between wanting something and getting it. James Whitcomb Riley's "Who Bides His Time" tries to rescue it. To "bide" is an old word for waiting and enduring, and the poem argues that the person who does this cheerfully, without panic, is not wasting days but earning something from each one. The poem admits that "defeat" and "poverty" exist. What it insists on is how a person should meet them: patiently, and with a song.
The construction supports that message. There are three stanzas of eight lines, each rhymed ABABCDCD, and each ends on the same four-syllable refrain, "Who bides his time." Seven fairly long, four-beat lines with a steady, walking rhythm are followed by a short one that stops the stanza like a person sitting down to wait. The refrain also opens every stanza, so each sentence starts and ends on the same words, with the promise held between them. The last rhyme carries the argument too. "Time" is answered in turn by "dime," "rhyme," and "clime," so patience is tied first to money, then to art, then to power over the whole world.
The first stanza is about money, and its central image is a kind of slow alchemy. The "paltry dime" will "grow golden in his palm," as if the coin were ripening rather than being spent or earned. The word "mirthful roundelay" is worth noticing. A roundelay is a song built around a refrain, which is exactly what this poem is, so the speaker's advice is carried out in the poem's own form. The patient man sings the sort of song the poem itself is.
The second stanza moves from the purse to the countryside and the emotions, and it is full of pleasing contradictions. The patient man finds "honey in the saltest tear," so sweetness is found inside grief rather than after it. He travels with "slowest feet," yet "Joy runs to meet him," and the fast, eager figure in this picture is Joy, not the traveller. Nature becomes his supporter. Birds act as heralds, and the roadsides "bloom in his applause," turning flowers into a clapping crowd. The "never-ending rhyme" of those blooms echoes the poem's own refrain, so the world seems to be repeating the speaker's point back to him.
The third stanza sets patience against hurry. The impatient person "fevers" in "the hot race that none achieves," a race with no winners, only exhaustion. Against that heat the poem places "cool-wreathen laurel," a victor's crown made gentler by "crimson berries in the leaves." The prize is no longer a hard metal trophy but something plant-like and quiet. The scope also widens here. The poem has moved from one man's coin, to a road and its birds, to a "goodly king" who sways "his hand o'er every clime." Even this ruler is unusual, because his signet ring, which would normally stamp orders and seal laws, has "peace writ" on it. His power is gentle, and the poem suggests that this is the only kind of power patience could produce.
Part of the poem's charm is also its limit. It is very sure of its rewards, and the gold, the joy, and the crown all arrive with little struggle. A skeptical reader might say that real defeat is named but quickly smoothed over. The imagery works against this reading, though. The tears are still "salt," and the feet are still "slowest," so the hardship is never denied, only reframed.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it treats patience as an activity rather than a form of giving up. Its waiting person sings, walks, tastes honey, and notices birds. The refrain also makes the reader wait, three times, for the same short line to arrive, so by the end we have practised the virtue the poem recommends.