Spring here is less a season than a mood, one that begins with birds and ends with two people picking a place to live. The poem opens on love as something loose in the air, "flying here and there," and closes with a "nest together." Everything in between is a gradual narrowing from the whole world of living things to one named, teased, adored person.
The first stanza keeps shuffling its few ingredients. "Birds' love and birds' song" becomes "Birds' song and birds' love," then "Men's song and men's love." Song and love keep swapping places, as if they were the same thing seen from two angles. The reordering also imitates birds in flight, the same handful of elements crossing and recrossing. Then comes the stanza's turning point: bird-love is "Passing with the weather," while men's song and love aim "To love once and forever." The poem has no punctuation to make this airtight, so the reading is partly an inference, but the contrast seems clear. Nature's love is seasonal. Human love wants to outlast the season. The ear supports this: "weather" and "forever" almost rhyme but not quite, with the stress falling differently in each. The two words sound alike and mean opposite things, which is the tension the stanza is about.
The second stanza dissolves the distinction it has just drawn. "Men's love and birds' love, / And women's love and men's!" The exclamation mark shows the speaker is carried away, and the categories blur. Women enter the poem here, and love becomes something everyone shares, creatures and people alike. Then the lens zooms in. The beloved arrives as "you my wren with a crown of gold," and the repeated "you" works like a hand reaching out. The earlier "you with gold for hair" is deliberately plain, almost childlike in its phrasing, and the gold carries over into the crown. A wren is a tiny bird, so calling her a queen is affectionate exaggeration. The speaker makes her royal and keeps her small enough to cuddle.
His own claim is the funniest and most revealing line: "I'll be King of the Queen of the wrens." He does not crown himself ruler of the wrens. He is king only of her, so his power is that he belongs to her. Even the rhythm adds to the joke. The line is long and tumbling where its neighbours are short, as if he can't stop piling up titles.
That looseness suits the poem's sound. The lines are short and bouncy, mostly built on two or three strong beats, so they read like a skipping song or nursery rhyme. The rhymes are simple and mostly paired in the even lines: "there" with "hair," "men's" with "wrens," and the full rhyme "feather" with "together." The "men's" and "wrens" pairing quietly puts people and birds into one sound. The repetition of "wrens" across lines four, five and seven makes the poem circle back on itself, as lovers do when they keep saying the same pet name.
The final turn is the idiom "birds of a feather." Normally the phrase suggests similarity, and the saying goes on to say such birds flock together. The speaker bends it toward something domestic and private: "We'll be birds of a feather, ... And all in a nest together." A flock is public and drifts with the season. A nest is a decision. After a poem full of flying, passing and weather, the last image is of staying put, which answers the "once and forever" of the first stanza.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It uses no difficult vocabulary and no elaborate argument, only repetition, a few pet names and one well-placed idiom. Yet it makes a real point about love: it may feel as natural as birdsong, but people want it to be something more lasting than the weather. The poem's playfulness doesn't undercut that wish. The joking and the sincerity arrive together, and by the last line they sound like the same voice.