Spring is late, the birds have gone quiet, and winter storms are scrambling the calendar. Dryden's speaker knows the reason, and it has nothing to do with weather: Chloris has left town. The poem opens with a brusque command, "Ask not the cause," as if the question were foolish. The answer is that nature takes its cue from her. By the end of the first stanza the logic is complete. "Fate provides / To make it spring where she resides." The real spring is wherever she happens to be, so the countryside is only catching up with a loss the lover feels personally.
The central idea is that a woman's beauty is a kind of absolute power, and that the lover is her chief casualty. The next stanzas make this a complaint against cruelty. She "cast not back a pitying eye" and left her admirer "to sigh, to languish, and to die." The three verbs are lined up like a stock list of lovesick symptoms, which hints that the speaker is performing his suffering with some style. The line "To give the wounds they will not cure!" makes her eyes into weapons, and the complaint turns on a neat paradox: the same eyes that inflict the injury could heal it.
The form helps that polish along. Each of the four stanzas has six lines of regular eight-syllable iambic rhythm, rhymed ababcc. The alternating rhymes (spring/sing, bear/year) set up the argument, and the closing couplet snaps it shut like a punchline. Look at how often the couplet delivers the stanza's sharpest idea: "To make it spring where she resides," then "wounds they will not cure," then "Thou shouldst have made her mercy more." The short lines and clean rhymes suit something called a song. They also keep the grief light on its feet, since a heavier meter would sink the joke.
The most interesting move comes in the third and fourth stanzas, where the poem starts to speak in religious terms. The speaker scolds the "Great god of Love" for making a face that can "all hearts command," that can "all religions … invade, / And change the laws of ev'ry land." Her beauty is a rival to churches and governments alike. In the last stanza she enters "the temple" and "adoring crowds before her fall." She is worshipped like a goddess. The claim that "she can restore the dead from tombs" is a miracle, and it sets up the poem's bitterest turn. She can "recall" every life "but mine."
The final couplet, "I only am by love design'd / To be the victim for mankind," takes the metaphor as far as it will go. A victim "for mankind" is a sacrificial figure, and the lover casts himself as the one chosen to suffer so everyone else can be spared. Judging by the tone, this is not meant as solemn blasphemy. The speaker is too pleased with his own cleverness for that, and the exaggeration lets us see him smiling a little at himself. Real despair rarely organizes itself so neatly into rhymed couplets. The poem seems to ask us to enjoy the performance, and perhaps to feel the sting beneath it.
This is why the poem is worth reading. It takes the familiar figure of the cruel beloved, and the lover who dies of her indifference, and gives it fresh energy through hyperbole and sharp control. Nothing is vague: each stanza makes one claim, develops it, and lands it. The poem also shows how a love lyric can be both sincere and playful. It lets the speaker be ridiculous and moving at once, and it does so in about twenty-four lines. For a student, it is a good example of how exaggeration, when it is controlled, can say something truthful about what it feels like to be left behind.