Nearly everyone has toyed with the fantasy of being young again, and Holmes opens with it at full volume. His old man all but shouts: "Oh for one hour of youthful joy! / Give back my twentieth spring!" He would rather "laugh, a bright-haired boy, / Than reign, a gray-beard king." Royal language runs through the first half of the poem ("reign," "crown," "spoils," "trophies"), so that old age looks like a conquest he is ready to hurl away. The verbs are impatient and theatrical: "off," "away," "tear out," "dash." Youth, meanwhile, is liquid and fiery. His "life-blood" is to stream "from boyhood's fount of flame," and he longs for a "giddy, reeling dream." He doesn't want to be young sensibly. He wants to be intoxicated.
The row of dots marks the shift into the dream itself, and the tone drops at once. The angel is "calmly smiling," and the first thing it calls the wish is "hasty." Its question is the hinge of the poem: is there "nothing in thy track" to make him stay? "Track" turns his life into a path behind him, and the picture of "swift seasons" hurrying back suggests time running in reverse. The old man's answer is where the comedy begins. "I'll take-- my-- precious-- wife!" The line keeps its regular length, but the dashes make every word stand alone, so reading aloud you can hear him fumbling, grabbing at what he can't give up. Holmes repeats the trick with "I'll take-- my-- girl-- and-- boys," and the second time it is funnier, because the old man now sounds faintly sheepish, a bargain-hunter whose basket keeps filling.
The angel's reply is built on near-repetition. "The man would be a boy again, / And be a husband too!" is written in "rainbow dew" with a "sapphire pen," a deliberately ornate, fairy-tale image. When the sentence returns with "father" in place of "husband," the pen is dropped and the angel says, in a very down-to-earth voice, "Why, this will never do." The magic collapses because of simple logic. A twenty-year-old has no wife or children, and the man cannot keep the fruits of the years while erasing the years themselves. The angel has already said as much: "all their gifts have fled / With those dissolving years." The old man's own memory, which "would recall" his "fond paternal joys," proves it.
Formally, the poem is easygoing. The quatrains alternate longer and shorter lines (roughly four beats, then three) and rhyme ABAB: "joy / boy," "spring / king." It is the sort of bouncing, songlike pattern that suits light verse. Holmes doesn't change it when the mood turns, and that steadiness helps the joke. The tone swerves from frantic longing to domestic tenderness without the music noticing.
There is a quiet irony too. In the second stanza the speaker wants to rip out "life's Wisdom-written page." Yet it is wisdom, in the form of a clear sense of what matters, that makes him choose his family over his twentieth spring. He throws away "Learning's crown" and then behaves like someone who has earned it.
The ending completes the circle. He wakes the house with his laughter, so the family he wouldn't surrender is physically there, being disturbed by him. He writes down the dream "to please the gray-haired boys," a phrase that quietly answers the opening. At the start he wanted to laugh as "a bright-haired boy." By the end he is laughing as a gray-haired one, and nothing has been lost in the exchange.
That gentle reversal is what makes the poem worth reading. The complaint that youth is gone is an old one, and many poems answer it with a sermon. Holmes answers with a joke that turns into gratitude, and he never states the moral outright. The reader sees it in the angel's dropped pen. A long life, the poem suggests, is not only a list of subtractions, because it has also produced people and love that no younger self could have offered in trade.