Earth gets no throne and no thunderbolt in this hymn, and no battle is fought for her. All she gets is a list of what she feeds. That is the poem's quiet boldness. The speaker calls her "universal Mother" and "Eldest of things," then spends most of his breath on the ordinary: creatures of the sea, birds in the air, animals on the ground, babies, ripe fruit. Her divinity is proved by abundance, not by command. The title credits Homer, though the Homeric Hymns are ancient Greek poems that tradition attached to his name. What we read is Shelley's English version, so the shape and sound of the lines are his choices.
Those choices are mostly rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter, the steady ten-syllable line. The first couplet, "keep / deep," lets the rhyme seem to bear out the claim about "foundations deep." Then the form starts to overflow. Each of the first two stanzas ends in a triplet, three rhymes where two would do. In the first it is "thee / tree / Divinity," and in the second "field / yield / filled," where "filled" only half-rhymes. The extra line works like the fruit that "Hang ripe and large": the verse cannot stop at the expected number. Both stanzas close on "revered Divinity," so the phrase works like a refrain, and the poem sounds like something meant to be chanted.
The central idea is complicated by one line. "Thy power both gives and takes away!" is the only place where loss intrudes on the praise, and its exclamation mark and balanced halves make it hard to miss. It changes how we read what follows. "Happy are they whom thy mild favours nourish" sounds generous, but the poem never says what becomes of those she does not favour. Mortal life is "held" beneath her sway, and the lavish picture of fields, cattle, "cities fair and free" and a house "with wealth … filled" begins to look like a reward as much as a gift. My own inference is that the praise carries a note of appeasement. You flatter a power that could withdraw all this.
The language of feeding runs through the middle of the poem. "Nourished," "sustain," "nourish," "life-sustaining" and "flourish" keep returning, and "nourish / flourish" is a feminine rhyme that makes the word almost bloom on the page. Earth here is a provider before she is anything else. The images of people and plants also keep merging. In the first stanza "Fair babes" and "fruits" share a sentence, as though both were harvests. In the second, the daughters dance "bloom-inwoven" among "soft flowers," so the girls seem woven into the meadow. The inverted phrase "the meadow-grass among" feels slightly bent to catch the rhyme with "song," a small reminder of what a translator pays to keep rhyme.
The last stanza turns from description to a bargain. The speaker bids Earth "Farewell," asks her to be "propitious," and offers "this brief melody" in exchange for "a happy life." The word "brief" is modest, even a little nervous, set against a goddess who has been "from everlasting." Yet the final line promises more than it seems to: "Nor thou nor other songs shall unremembered be." The singer vows to remember Earth, and his song becomes one link in a chain of songs. Farewell, request and promise of remembrance were a common way for ancient hymns to close, and the pattern gives the ending its ritual weight.
The poem matters first as a bridge. It lets English readers hear a very old kind of religious feeling, in which gratitude is the main emotion and the divine is the ground underfoot. It also shows a Romantic poet fitting an ancient voice into English couplets without losing its warmth. For a modern reader the hymn feels surprisingly current. Its picture of humans as dependent guests in a world that "gives and takes away" is an old idea, and it may sound fresh to anyone thinking about how much of life rests on the soil.