Stevenson opens with a line big enough to carve on a monument: "Great is the sun, and wide he goes / Through empty heaven with repose." The sun is vast, remote and unhurried. But the rest of the poem zooms in, from the whole sky to a keyhole, a cobwebbed attic and the dark hollow of the ivy. By the end it is clear that the subject is not the sun's power but its kindness. The central idea is that something immense can also be intimate. The light that crosses the heavens will take the trouble to reach the dustiest corners of an ordinary household.
The form suits this calm confidence. There are five quatrains of rhyming couplets (goes/repose, pull/cool, around/ground), and nearly every line falls into smooth four-beat iambic rhythm. The pattern rarely stumbles, so the verse seems to move with the sun's "repose", never rushing. The few bends in the syntax stand out all the more. In "He, through the keyhole, maketh glad," the commas make the line squeeze and pause as the light itself must to get through a small gap. The old-fashioned "maketh" gives the line the dignity of ancient praise, as though the sun deserves language from a hymn or a psalm. That grand register sits comfortably beside homely details like a parlour and a hay-loft.
Personification does most of the imagistic work. The sun has "golden fingers," a "golden face," a "glittering look," and he even "smiles." The second stanza turns this into a small comedy. The household pulls the blinds "closer still" to keep the parlour cool, and the sun, undefeated, "will find a chink or two / To slip his golden fingers through." He is like a friendly intruder in a game of hide-and-seek, more playful than threatening. Just before this comes one of the poem's freshest images: "More thick than rain he showers his rays." Rain is something we usually shelter from, yet here it becomes a picture of light falling in abundance.
The third stanza shows what kind of generosity this is. The places the sun visits are not grand. The attic is "dusty" and "spider-clad," the tiles have a "broken edge," and the hay-loft is "laddered." Those adjectives are shabby, but the verbs are cheerful: the keyhole "maketh glad" and the loft receives a smile. The sun does not choose the tidy or the beautiful. By the fourth stanza he no longer has to sneak. In the garden he "bares" his face "to all the garden ground," and even the ivy's "inmost nook" gets a warm look. The word "Meantime" tells us that all this happens at once, so the sun is doing everything everywhere.
The final stanza lifts us back to "Above the hills, along the blue," so the poem ends where it began, in the sky. This circular shape makes the sun's journey feel like a daily round. Only now does Stevenson reveal the metaphor he has been holding back: the sun is "the gardener of the World." Everything before suddenly fits. Warming, visiting every corner and painting the rose are a gardener's tasks, and "footing true" suggests a sure-footed walk along a path. The capital "W" quietly makes the small garden and the whole world the same size, as though the sun treats them with equal care. His purpose, we are told, is "to please the child." That phrase suggests the poem was written with young readers in mind, and its plain words and clear images suit them.
What makes the poem worth reading is its balance. It never shrinks the sun into something cute, and it never lets it become cold and distant. A sliver of brightness through a blind on a hot afternoon is an ordinary thing. Stevenson suggests it can be seen as a gift, deliberately delivered by a patient gardener on his rounds.