A child sits in a garden turning flower names over in his head and decides they can't possibly belong to ordinary plants. That is the whole plot of Stevenson's "The Flowers," and the pleasure lies in how convincing the child's logic is. He knows the names "from nurse", so they reach him secondhand, as adult facts, yet he treats them as clues. Look at what they share: Gardener's garters, Shepherd's purse, Bachelor's buttons, Lady's smock. Each one is a scrap of clothing or something you carry, a wardrobe in miniature. No wonder he concludes, with a triumphant exclamation mark, "These must all be fairy names!"
The central idea is that imagination can turn borrowed words into a place to live. Nothing here is made up from nothing. The names are real, and the child's achievement is to take them seriously. The second stanza shows his excitement building. "Fairy" appears three times in two lines ("Fairy places, fairy things, / Fairy woods"), like a child chanting, carried along by his own idea. Then the scale shifts. Flowers become "woods" and "tiny trees for tiny dames", as if he were lying on the lawn with his face close to the soil, where a patch of thyme really does look like a forest. The repeated word "tiny" keeps the camera low and close.
The form suits this. Each of the four stanzas is made of two rhymed couplets, and the lines are short, seven syllables with the stress falling on the first syllable: ALL the NAMES I KNOW from NURSE. Every line ends on a stressed syllable, which gives the poem a clipped, bouncing, nursery-rhyme beat. The rhymes are plain and satisfying: nurse and purse, things and wings, boughs and house, thyme and climb. The couplets click shut like little doors. The most playful pairing is "smock" with "Hollyhock". The tall, stately hollyhock is promoted to "Lady", and its title is made to rhyme with a piece of her wardrobe.
The third stanza gives the fairies a social life. They "weave a house", and the verb quietly echoes the cloth and clothing of the first stanza. Then comes the best detail: "the braver fairies climb" the tree-tops of rose or thyme. A reader who only glanced at this world would not think of fairies being braver or more timid than one another. The child has clearly lived in this daydream long enough to know its personalities, and that makes it more convincing.
The last stanza turns on a small piece of politeness. "Fair are grown-up people's trees", he concedes, but "the fairest woods are these." The grown-ups' trees get a nod, and then the child quietly rules them out. "Fair" and "fairest" also echo "fairy", so the idea of beauty and the idea of the fairy world blur together. The final couplet then reverses a child's usual complaint. Children are normally too small for things, but here the trouble is being too big: "if I were not so tall, / I should live for good and all." The conditional "if I were not" admits that the dream has a limit. He can see the world but cannot enter it. Judging by the tone, there is a faint wistfulness here, as though growing up were a door slowly closing. The poem never says so, and the child seems more cheerful than sad.
What makes the poem worth reading is its tact. Stevenson does not talk down to the child or turn him into something cute. The diction is simple, the reasoning is sound, and the voice stays steady from the nurse's lesson to the final wish. The poem treats a child's way of seeing as a kind of knowledge, not a mistake to be corrected. After reading it, it is hard to look at a flowerbed and not wonder who might be living in the thyme.