Seven lines are enough for Shelley to stage a small seduction. A speaker urges someone to follow them into the woods, to a secluded hollow where the two can "intermingle." The reason comes in the last two lines: the violet and the breeze are so busy with their own affairs that they will take no notice of "I and you." The poem's central idea is that human desire is not a private scandal but part of nature's everyday business. The woods already hold one pair of lovers, so the human pair can slip in unremarked.
The opening works like a path that narrows as you walk it. "Follow to the deep wood's weeds" repeats its command in the next line, and each destination is more hidden than the last. We start in the "deep wood," go down into "the wild-briar dingle" (a dingle is a small, sheltered hollow), and the briar adds a hint of thorny, untended wildness. The speaker never explains or begs. The bare imperative, "Follow," assumes the listener is already on the way.
The sound of the verse quietly acts out its subject. "Dingle" is rhymed with "intermingle," so the two words literally mingle in the ear, and the longest, most liquid word in the poem arrives exactly where the speaker names their wish. The rhyme scheme is also odd. The first line, ending in "weeds," has no partner, and after it the poem settles into three couplets: dingle/intermingle, tale/gale, do/you. A reader might hear the lone opening line as a single figure waiting to be joined, though that is an inference, not something the poem says. The rhythm is a loose, tripping four-beat line that leans on stressed first syllables (FOL-low, WHERE we SEEK) and swings between seven and eight syllables as it alternates blunt and feminine endings. It feels light and quick, close to a song.
The middle couplet gives the violet a voice. She "tells her tale / To the odour-scented gale," a lovely way of describing something real: a flower releases perfume and the wind carries it off. Shelley dresses this up as confidence between two characters, and the rhyme of "tale" with "gale" binds them together. The phrase "odour-scented" is technically redundant, since odour and scent mean the same thing, but the doubling makes the air feel thick with perfume, as though the whole dingle were soaked in it.
The last couplet turns the poem's logic around. "For they two have enough to do / Of such work as I and you" explains the invitation and adds a wink. "They two" and "I and you" mirror each other, so the flower and wind become a pair set beside the human pair. The word "work" is wonderfully dry. It plays down what is going on, which makes the hint louder. The tone also changes. The lyrical landscape gives way to something close to casual talk, as if the speaker were lowering their voice to explain why nobody will be watching. The poem ends on "you," so the last thing we hear is the person being addressed.
The title tells us this is a fragment, and I won't guess whether it was abandoned or simply left short. As it stands, it reads as nearly complete, and part of its charm is how much it leaves unsaid. Shelley is one of the major English Romantic poets, and the habit of seeing human feeling reflected in nature runs through his work. His "Love's Philosophy," for example, argues for love by pointing to things in nature that mingle. This fragment makes a lighter, more playful version of that argument. It is a slight piece, but a skilled one. It packs an invitation, a small piece of personification, a pun on sound and sense, and a sly joke into seven lines, and it leaves the reader to follow, as the speaker asks.