Spring in Stevenson's poem is something to be heard before it is seen. Streamlets "gush", the thrush sings "clear in the greenwood", and the speaker receives "the gift of the tongues of the lea". The phrase sounds like the biblical gift of tongues, and the poem seems to invite that echo: the meadows speak, and for a few weeks the speaker can understand them. The central idea is renewal. An "olden heart" wakes up, dances with the streams and learns to sing again, and the poem ends with that heart settled and content inside a living world.
The form is tightly patterned. There are four stanzas of seven lines, each rhyming *aabbccb*. Three couplets come first, and then the final line swings back to the sound of the second pair. Each time it also repeats a word: "meadows", "arrows", "highways", "meadows" again. Those closing lines work like the chorus of a carol, which fits the title. The rhymes themselves are playful. "Meadows/shadows" and "sparrows/barrows" are two-syllable rhymes, and their light, falling endings make the lines skip. The first two lines of each stanza are longer and steadier, and the short lines that follow ("Comes again to me") quicken the pace. The one rough joint is "gods/sod" in the last stanza, a near-rhyme where the ear expects a perfect one. It is a small roughness in an otherwise smooth poem.
Sound dominates the imagery, and the second stanza shows it best. The heart "dances with the dancing burns". "Burns" is the Scots word for streams, and repeating "dance" makes the water and the heart move together. Then comes a list: sparrows, rain, "grimy" barrows, a "silver-bellied cloud". The heart sings to all of it without sorting the pretty from the ordinary. The cloud seen from below, like the pale belly of a fish, turns into "silver rainy arrows", so the rain flashes down as something bright rather than gloomy. The list is generous, and that generosity is much of the poem's charm.
The third stanza widens the view. The skylark's song comes "down", and the heart immediately hears "the singing of the town" as well. "Youth on the highways / And lovers in byways" belong to spring as much as the birds do. The verbs show the heart's growing attention: it "bears", "hears", "follows", "sees", "hearkens". It is no longer just dancing but taking in the whole season, human and natural alike.
In the last stanza the earth is "alive with gods", a pagan, almost mythical phrase, and the human and natural worlds join. The "lusty ploughman" breaks the sod while the grass sings and the flowers smile. Personification turns the whole landscape into a company of singers, with the ploughman among them. The speaker's heart, which has danced and followed and hearkened, now "sits at ease". The poem has moved from excitement to peace. It also closes a loop. In the first stanza the gift of tongues "comes again to me", and in the last the heart is "Singing the songs of the meadows". What was received is given back.
The archaic words ("quires", "leas", "straightway", "hearkens") give the poem the feel of an old song, though the feeling is easy to share. The repeated words are not padding. They work like the repeated phrases of a tune, and they make the reader feel the season returning.
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. It has no plot and no argument, only a list of sounds and a heart responding to them. Yet it makes a real claim: joy in nature is a kind of listening, and anyone, however "olden", can learn the language again. Readers who know Stevenson through *Treasure Island* may find this a quieter side of his writing, but it is just as confident in its music.