Stevenson's speaker makes a long list of promises, and not one of them can be held in the hand. The "brooches and toys" turn out to be "bird-song at morning and star-shine at night." The "palace fit for you and me" is built from "green days in forests and blue days at sea." Within four lines the jeweller's shop has been swapped for the weather. The central idea is that this kind of love needs no property, only a shared way of looking at the world and a shared road to walk.
The language treats time as a building material. Days don't happen in forests; they *are* green, as if an afternoon could be cut and fitted into a wall. A palace is normally stone and gold, but this one is made of colour and hours. Stevenson also frames the day with a neat symmetry. Morning and night bracket the first stanza, and the pairing returns in the second with "rainfall at morning and dewfall at night." The lovers live between those two points, in a house whose roof is the sky.
The second stanza is the oddest and the most playful. "I will make my kitchen, and you shall keep your room" sounds like a couple dividing up a household, but the house is a landscape: "Where white flows the river and bright blows the broom." The broom is presumably the flowering shrub, and "blows" here means "blossoms." Judging by the sound, the word may also hint at a sweeping brush, a little housework joke hidden in the scenery. The inverted word order, with colour first and verb second, gives the line a ballad's formal ring. "White" then returns when the beloved is told to "keep your body white," washing in rain and dew. Cleanliness comes from the weather, not from a bathroom.
The grammar shifts quietly too. The speaker's promises are "I will make," while the beloved's are "you shall wash" and "you shall keep." The first is a gift, the second closer to a place assigned. Today's readers may notice the old-fashioned roles here, with one person making and the other tidily keeping. The poem's tone is so tender that the effect is more of a charmed fairy-tale arrangement than a set of orders.
Formally, the poem is three quatrains of rhyming couplets, and the rhymes are plain and full: delight/night, me/sea, room/broom, near/hear, admire/fire. That plainness gives it the feel of a song, which suits a poem that ends up being about song. The long lines have a swinging, roughly galloping beat, with light syllables running between the stresses. Read aloud, it moves at a walking pace. Repeated openings ("I will make… I will make…") work like a spell, and the soft consonants of "bright blows the broom" make the line itself sound breezy.
The last stanza changes direction. The speaker stops making things and starts remembering, and the mood becomes private: "when no one else is near." This is where the poem's only exclamation mark falls: "The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear!" The song is a secret held by two people, "That only I remember, that only you admire." The opening "this" may point to the poem itself, and that is an inference from the text. If so, the poem becomes the music it promises, and the real gift all along was words. The brooches were verses.
The final line is the longest to say: "Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire." The word "stretches" makes the line stretch, and the picture holds both movement and shelter, a road going on and a fire at its edge. The lovers' home is therefore not a fixed address but a life of travelling with a warm place to stop. The title "Romance" fits, since it seems to carry both senses of the word, love and adventure.
What makes the poem worth reading is its generous trick. Everything it offers is free to anyone who goes outside, yet it is presented as precious, because the speaker's attention is what makes it so. It is a love poem that refuses to promise wealth, and it is more believable and more charming for that.