Peggy says good morning and the speaker answers "good bye." It is a small slip, the kind a shy young man makes when his tongue runs ahead of his nerves, and it sets the tone for a poem that begins in comedy and ends in quiet helplessness. A man remembers a girl he courted in spring, describes her face, her walk and her dress, and finally admits that she has been gone ten years and he still "know[s] not what to do." Its central idea is that love survives in ordinary things: a scrap of cloth, a hedgerow colour, a planting season that keeps coming round while the person does not.
That seasonal rhythm is built into the first stanza. All four lines rhyme on the same sound (bye, rye, shy, rye), and "rye" appears twice, so the stanza seems to circle back on itself like the farming year. The dialect word "dib," for making holes to plant seed, roots the meeting in village work. The speaker first meets Peggy "when the farmers sow the rye," and every spring that follows repeats the scene without her.
The lines are long and loose, with about seven beats each, and they move like a country song. Mostly they rhyme in simple couplets (grass/pass, sense/thence, size/eyes), which gives the poem a cheerful, singing quality. The sound often matches the sense. In "Her half laced boots fit tightly as she tripped along the grass," the clipped t-sounds make her step audible, and the next line lightens it further: "she set her foot so lightly where the early bee doth pass." The slightly old-fashioned "doth" gives the line a touch of ballad charm without making it stiff.
The most surprising phrase is the repeated description of Peggy's face as "common sense." We expect a lover to praise beauty, but the speaker praises something steadier: a face that is sensible, honest and unpretending. That fits the images that follow. Her lips are "cherries of the spring," her eyes hazel, her body "straight and tall as is the poplar tree." Then comes the most unromantic comparison of all, "Smooth as the freestone of the wall." Freestone is an ordinary building stone, and a poet reaching for grandeur would have chosen marble. This speaker draws every comparison from what he sees in fields and hedges. The wording is plain too: "bonny as to size" sounds more like a neighbour's assessment than a sonnet. One small shift is easy to miss. Peggy is first "a young thing," then "the young thing," as if in his memory she has become the only one.
The last stanza turns on a quiet detail. Peggy's chocolate-brown gown is "full of cherries white," which echoes her cherry lips, so even her clothes seem part of the spring orchard. The speaker says "I keep a bit on't for her sake," and the shift to the present tense matters. He has kept a scrap of the fabric, and he loves her "day and night" now, not only then. The tender, slightly comic line "I drest myself just like a prince" shows how much the courtship mattered to him and how carefully he tried to impress. Whom Peggy "went to woo" is left unclear, and the poem never explains why she left. It gives no death, no marriage and no quarrel. That silence is part of its effect, because the speaker himself has no explanation to offer.
The ending is flat on purpose. "She's been gone some ten years since, and I know not what to do" has no consolation and no lesson. The rhyme of "woo" with "do" makes the final line sound like a question nobody answers. After three stanzas of bright, concrete description, the abstraction of "what to do" is all the more striking, because he has run out of images.
The poem matters for its sincerity and its trust in plain things. The feeling is never announced in grand language. It comes through cherries, stone, poplar and a kept scrap of cloth, and through a speaker who is awkward in the first line and still stuck in the last. Judging by its vocabulary and imagery, the voice belongs to the village world it describes, and the poem lets that voice speak for itself.