An old man walks out in April and finds that his heart has not aged at all. That small drama is the whole of Stevenson's poem. It is more surprising than it sounds, because the speaker begins by hailing a god and ends by describing his own chest. The opening invocation ("beautiful, bountiful") promises a hymn, but what arrives is closer to a confession: "Cold, grey-headed; and still to my / Heart, Spring comes with a bound." The weight falls on "still." Age has done its work on the head, but not on the part that responds.
The poem has no rhyme, so its music has to come from rhythm. Stevenson leans on a rolling, dactylic beat, one stress followed by two light syllables, which you can hear in "beautiful, bountiful," "daisies and crocuses," and "voices and violins." These triple-time words skip and sway, much like the bounding spring the speaker describes. Although the poem is printed as one block, it falls into five units of four lines: two long lines, then two short. The long lines sweep forward and the short ones draw breath. The effect is of classical-sounding verse recast in English stresses, though that is an impression from the sound, not something the poem announces.
Sentences also spill over the line endings, stranding words at the edge: "still to my / Heart," "willowy / Fields," "virginal / Green." The last is the neatest. The line halts on a description, and the thing described arrives a beat late, so the reader waits for the green just as the speaker does.
The poem's dominant image is music. Spring is a "song-leader," "chorally resonant," and a "child-conductor." The earth fills with "scents, voices and violins" and "leads her performances." The most revealing comparison likens spring to a skilled musician who "wakes old chords in the memory." For an old man, spring is a replay as much as a novelty. It plucks strings that were laid down long ago. The closing lines push the idea further by treating a smell as something played: "one more touch of the bow, smell of the virginal / Green." Scent becomes sound, and the senses blur. "Virginal" is also the name of an old keyboard instrument, which sits comfortably in this vocabulary, whether or not Stevenson meant the pun.
Temperature is handled just as carefully. The god is a "cold-dyed shield in the sky," presumably the pale arc of an April sky, and the speaker is "cold" himself. The same word covers both, which makes the point that spring's warmth is not really a matter of weather. It happens inside him.
The address also shifts. The poem opens on a "Flower god," a pagan figure, but by the middle Spring is a "she," a "dear mother in God, fostering violets." Pagan invocation and devotional phrasing blend, and the divine becomes tender and maternal. Her smile falls on children, and one of them, in the poem's boldest phrase, "drinks of eternity." A child lives without the sense of time passing. The line "O child, happy are children!" is the one moment when delight turns to a sigh, a trace of envy before the speaker claims the same gift for himself.
The ending is almost greedy. "One more touch of the bow... one more" sounds like someone calling for an encore. Then the poem stops on "Feels new life with an ecstasy," without any neat moral.
Stevenson is best known for prose such as *Treasure Island* and *Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde*, so a poem like this shows another side of him, a taste for sound-play and for open feeling. It is worth reading because it gives spring poetry to someone who is not young. The usual cheerfulness of the season is complicated by age, memory and longing, and the poem lets all of that surface in a single breath of April.