Winter has a grievance, and Burns lets him air it before the king of the gods. Old Winter, frosty-bearded and sulking, petitions Jove: why should he alone be saddled with a "hated doom severe"? His days are "cheerless," his nights drag, and his months bring only "spleeny English hanging, drowning." The remedy he asks for is Maria's birthday. Give him that, and "Spring, Summer, Autumn, cannot match me." Jove agrees, the storyteller wraps things up, and Winter ends up "in glory." The title tells us the occasion, an impromptu verse for Mrs. Riddell's birthday. So the whole fable is really a compliment. Maria is so bright that a single day of hers can redeem the bleakest season. The poem never describes her at all. We learn how remarkable she is only from what her birthday does for Winter. Judging by that logic, her birthday falls in the cold months.
The joke depends on tone. Winter's speech is not tragic. It is the whine of someone who thinks he has been overlooked. "What have I done of all the year" sounds like a man pleading his case, and "be mighty civil" is wonderfully cheeky. Burns has Winter address the king of the gods almost as he would a neighbour who owes him a favour. The classical machinery of Jove and "Night's horrid car" (the chariot of night) is there to be teased. The grand setting makes the casual bargaining funnier.
The language of that bargaining is worth noticing. Winter wants to "counterbalance" his "evil," to be "enrich[ed]," to have something nothing else can "match." This is the vocabulary of accounts and trade. The poem treats the birthday as a precious commodity, a "brilliant gift," and the word "brilliant" matters. Everything on Winter's side of the ledger is dark and dull: "cheerless suns," "horrid" night, "dismal months." Against this, Maria's day arrives as pure light. The contrast is the poem's main image, and it works in a single adjective.
The darkest joke comes in line 8. Winter's list of woes builds toward "joys" being "crowning," and then the rhyme lands on "drowning." The jolt from crowning to drowning is deliberate bathos. The "spleeny English" are being teased with a national stereotype. "Spleen" was an old word for gloominess, and the line suggests that English melancholy peaks in dull weather. That is an inference from the wording rather than a documented fact, but the comic intent is clear enough. Gloom has become so total that it ends in suicide, and the poem says so in the tone of a shrug.
The form suits all this lightness. The poem is two eight-line stanzas of rhyming couplets, with short lines of roughly four beats each. That bouncing, tripping rhythm keeps everything quick and a little breathless, like an improvised toast. Each couplet closes with a small click: "year/severe," "know/slow," "civil/evil." The most playful rhymes come where the praise is greatest. "Enrich me" and "match me" are double rhymes, two-syllable matches that sound slightly absurd, as if Winter is so pleased with himself that he can't help rhyming. The repetition in "Give me, and I've no more to say, / Give me Maria's natal day!" reads like begging that cannot wait for the first sentence to finish. "Natal day" is a stiff, formal phrase, and it sounds almost ceremonial next to the chatty "mighty civil."
There is also a neat frame. The story opens with Winter praying "once" to Jove and closes with Winter rejoicing "once" in glory. The narrator even steps in with "so ends my story," like a teller of fables rounding off a tale. The ending reverses the beginning. The figure who started out hard done by is now envied by the other three seasons, and the poem's whole argument has moved from complaint to triumph in sixteen lines.
That compact reversal is what makes the poem worth reading. It is occasional verse, written to mark a particular day, and it doesn't pretend to be more. Yet it manages a lot with very little. It brings a personified season to life, it makes a joke about English gloom, and it flatters its subject by never flattering her directly. The compliment is hidden inside a joke, which is often the best place for it.