Before anything else happens, Dunbar sends us to the window. "Come to the pane, draw the curtain apart" makes the reader a fellow watcher, standing beside the speaker as a girl walks down a street in blustery March weather. That is all the plot there is. Over three stanzas, though, the walk becomes a contest between a girl and the wind, and the contest becomes a picture of how to meet life's troubles with a clear head.
The sound of the poem does much of this work. Dunbar wrote in both dialect and standard English, and here he uses standard English, so the music comes from rhythm and rhyme alone. Each stanza has eight lines in rhymed couplets (apart/heart, street/sweet, grace/face), and the lines move in a bouncing, triple-beat rhythm that leans on dactyls: "TRIPping aLONG with imPETuous GRACE." You can almost feel the quick, light steps. The couplets click shut like a series of small, confident nods. Each stanza ends on the same phrase, "my little March girl," so the refrain keeps returning to her, as steady as she is.
The imagery sets delicacy against roughness. She has "a hint of the violet's delicate bloom" and "the rose's pervading perfume," spring flowers placed in a month that has not quite earned them. The wind, meanwhile, is given a personality. At first he is a suitor who cannot help "kissing her face" and "wrapping her round in his stormy embrace." Then the language turns to combat: "rout," "bout," "victor," and finally "ripe for the strife." The wind is both admirer and opponent, and the girl beats him by laughing, not by fighting. "Serenely she laughs at his rout" is the poem's quiet joke, since the bully gets no reaction at all.
Dunbar also lets the girl and the wind resemble each other. Her hair is "truant-like," as if her curls have skipped school, and they fall "curl upon curl," which sets up the rhyme with "swirl," the wind's own word. Her curls swirl just as the wind does, so she is not a stiff figure resisting the weather. She is free and a little wild herself, and her calm comes from inside. "Placid" appears twice, once for her in the first stanza and once for her soul in the second, and the repetition marks it as the quality the poem prizes most.
The second stanza makes the poem's boldest move: "So may life's passions about her soul swirl, / Leaving it placid." Here the weather becomes a metaphor. The wind stands for everything that might batter a person, and the speaker's wish is that she will meet it all as she meets March. The poem never says whether she is a sweetheart or a child. "Girl of my heart" and "little maid" leave that open, and the ambiguity lets the tenderness read as either romantic or protective.
The last stanza is the most playful. Dunbar turns on the wind directly with "Ah! Wind, and bah! Wind, what might have you now?", a mock-heroic taunt that rhymes and sneers at once. Then comes the clever ending: "Blow, Wind, and grow, Wind, and eddy and swirl, / But bring to me, Wind,—my little March girl." The speaker gives the wind permission to do anything it likes, so long as it delivers her to him. The old enemy is turned into an errand-runner. This is a small reversal, but it shows the same confidence the girl has, now shared by the one who watches her.
The poem is not large or solemn, and it does not try to be. It is a light poem with a serious idea inside it: composure is a kind of strength, and it can look like laughter. Its pleasures are mostly those of craft, with the invitation to the window, the walking rhythm, the wind turning from lover to fighter to servant, and the repeated refrain. A few lines about a girl on a windy street end up praising someone who meets the world's storms and is neither flattened nor hardened by them.