Nothing much happens in the first three stanzas of Stevenson's poem, and that is the trick. Girls walk down a lane, up a meadow, home to bed, each time under a different sky. Only in the last stanza does the poem reveal what it has been doing: "when life draws to its even / And the day of man is past," the same walk becomes a life, and the bedtime homecoming becomes a homecoming to heaven. The central idea is that death can be understood as the natural end of a long, pleasant day, with nothing frightening about it.
The construction is very tidy. Every stanza is a single sentence, and each begins with a "When" clause. The scene builds up across the first two lines, and the main clause arrives in the third: "The girls go down the lane." That delay gives each stanza a small sense of release, like a step landing. The fourth line then shrinks to three or four syllables ("Two by two," "Fair as flowers," "One by one," "Home at last"), so each stanza closes with a short, soft tap. The lines are brief, mostly six to eight syllables, with a light, tripping beat, and the ABAB rhymes (rain/lane, blue/two) are simple and clear. The effect is close to a nursery rhyme or lullaby, which suits a poem about being called in for the night.
The imagery follows the light as it fades. The poem begins with rain, sun and "the bird … in the blue," moves through "shadow / And the singing of the showers," and reaches the "dusky red" of evening and the moon that "succeeds the sun." Even the weather is gentle: showers sing, and the rain is already over before the poem begins. The direction of travel changes too. The girls go *down* the lane, *up* the meadow, then *home*. The only simile, "Fair as flowers," comes at the high point of the day, when the girls are out in the open meadow. A reader might take that as the fullness of youth, though the poem never says so.
The most striking detail is the counting. The girls set out "two by two," but by evening they go home "one by one." The companionship thins into quiet, separate journeys, which hints that each person goes home alone. Then the final stanza gathers everyone back with "they shall *all* go home." The poem allows the loneliness of ending and then answers it with reunion.
The word "home" does a lot of the work. It appears in the third stanza ("go home to bed") and twice in the fourth ("go home to heaven," "Home at last"). The third lines of those stanzas are nearly identical, so bed and heaven occupy the same place in the pattern. Sleep and death are set side by side without comment, and the comparison is comforting rather than grim. "Home at last" also carries a sigh of relief, as if the whole day had been leading there.
The last stanza changes the pattern slightly. The verb shifts from the habitual present ("go") to the promise of "shall," so what was routine becomes a hope. The first rhyme there, "even" and "heaven," is imperfect: the spelling matches, but the vowels do not. "Even" is an old-fashioned word for evening, and it quietly links the day of the girls to the "day of man." The near-rhyme could be heard as a small gap between what we see and what we are promised, so that the ending reads as faith rather than proof. That is an interpretation, but the poem's confidence is clearly a gentle one.
Stevenson is best known for adventure stories such as *Treasure Island*, but this poem has no danger in it. Its significance lies in its restraint. Nearly every word is short and plain, and the poem never mentions death directly, only "life draws to its even." A subject that usually brings fear or grand language is treated in the same small voice as a walk down a lane. By the end, a reader has been walked through an ordinary afternoon and evening and has accepted the last step without noticing the moment it became the biggest subject there is.