Burns begins by confessing he is not up to the job. "O how shall I, unskilfu', try / The poet's occupation?" he asks, and the question sounds humble. Even the "tunefu' powers" that whisper inspiration, he says, "maun dare an effort mair / Than aught they ever gave us" before they could do justice to "lovely Davies". The whole song is built on this move: she cannot be praised enough, and the failure to praise her becomes the praise. The poem gives us her name and her effect on others, and little else. We never learn what she looks like or says. What we see is how people react to her.
The sound of the verse keeps the song light and quick. The stanzas run to eight lines, and most of the longer lines hide a rhyme in the middle: "I" and "try", "powers" and "hours", "dare" and "mair", "rehearse" and "verse". Those inner chimes make the lines trip along, which suits a piece the title calls a song. The shorter lines end on feminine rhymes such as "occupation" and "inspiration". Each stanza closes on Davies's name, which acts as a refrain. Burns even rhymes the name itself. "Gave us" answers "Davies" in the first stanza, and "wave is", "slave is" and "brave is" do the same later. This is clever, but the cost shows in "The deed too daring brave is", a twisted bit of word order that bends to fit the rhyme. A reader can enjoy the ingenuity and still notice the strain.
The imagery sets up a contest between warmth and cold, and between power and helplessness. In the second stanza her arrival is "Phoebus in the morning", the sun after rain lighting up a garden. Her departure brings a very different picture: "the wretch" looking "o'er Siberia's shore, / When winter-bound the wave is". The sea is locked in ice, and nothing can move. Judging by the simile, the speaker feels her absence as a kind of imprisonment, and the comparison is deliberately out of proportion. A pang at saying goodbye is set beside a frozen, hopeless coast.
The third stanza turns to royalty and war. Her smile comes "frae 'boon the lift", from above the sky, and it makes "us mair than princes". Her glances carry "a sceptred hand, a king's command". Then comes the neatest twist: the soldier, "the man in arms 'gainst female charms", ends up as "her willing slave", who "hugs his chain". The words "willing" and "hugs" matter here. Nobody is forced into this slavery, and the surrender is a pleasure. The poem has borrowed the language of conquest and turned it into flattery.
The final stanza returns to the sun, now at its height, "the sun's meridian splendour". Only "the eagle's gaze" can look at it without flinching, and the speaker's Muse is no eagle. The sun appeared earlier as a gentle morning image, and now it is almost too bright to look at, so the praise has grown with the poem. The ending is a neat paradox. The poet says he will "drap the lyre, and mute admire", yet he has just spent thirty-odd lines singing. The silence he promises is only a pose, and the performance is the real compliment.
Burns writes in a mixture of Scots and English. "Unskilfu'", "maun", "mair", "sae", "frae", "wad" and "drap" give the verse a spoken, local flavour, while "Phoebus", "sceptred" and "meridian" lift it into polished, classical language. That mixture is part of the pleasure. The tone is warm and conversational, with a slightly ceremonial dressing.
What makes the song worth reading is how openly it plays with the idea of compliment. It does not pretend to capture Davies. It admits the task is beyond it and lets the admission do the work. The poem is flattering and a little theatrical, and it knows it is being both. Its charm comes from that self-aware lightness, the sense that the speaker is bowing, smiling and enjoying the bow.