Anyone who has ever sulked beautifully will recognise the speaker of this poem. He walks out into an evening of sea, clover and sunset and finds that every sense confirms his misery. The sky has "sorrow", the waves and the seagull seem to speak, and what they say is always the same: "The best is over!" Then he turns his head, sees a row of pine-trees, and the mood breaks. The central idea is that despair can be cured by attention. The speaker stops performing his grief the moment he looks at something that has no interest in his feelings.
The first two-thirds of the poem are built to feel like being trapped. Brooke keeps returning to a few sounds, and the rhymes keep falling back on "-y" and "-over": sky, cry, sigh, die, I on one side, and clover, over, lover, recover on the other. The word "over" appears again and again, meaning "finished" each time. "Cry" is repeated across the stanza break, so the line seems to stumble over itself. The line lengths are ragged, too. A tiny line like "And because I," breaks off mid-thought, as if the speaker has run out of breath, and "O silly lover!" is a sudden, mocking little jolt. Reading it aloud, you can hear someone going round and round the same thought.
The imagery works the same way. The speaker smells "the sea, and earth, and the warm clover" and hears the waves, so the scene is richly physical. Yet he hears only one message in it. The "song they always sing" sounds suspiciously like his own voice, and the seagull's cry is "mocking" because he is mocking himself. Nature here is a mirror. Notice that the voice taunting him, "You may remember now, and think, and sigh", calls him a "silly lover". Even in his lowest moment he is slightly aware that he is overdoing it, and the wish to die in the ninth line, repeated in the stanza's final words, has a theatrical ring.
The turn comes physically: he leaves "the sad west", the direction of sunset and endings, and looks north to "the white north sky". The pines are "sharp" and "black", but the adjectives that matter are "beautiful, and still". The long, slow line "Very beautiful, and still, and bending over" is full of pauses, and the poem finally slows down. Here is the neatest moment of the poem. "Over", which has meant "finished" all the way through, now means something physical: the trees are simply bending over, like people leaning in quietly. The word's grip on time is loosened, and it becomes just a shape in space.
The ending is a small act of self-forgiveness. The speaker "forgot to play the lover", which admits that the role had been a performance, and then he "laughed". That laugh is the real recovery. The last line, "Being glad of you, O pine-trees and the sky!", echoes the earlier "O silly lover!" Both are exclamations beginning with "O", but the first was a taunt and the second is a thank-you. The pronoun "you" is striking as well. Where a love poem would address a beloved, he addresses the landscape, which suggests the trees have replaced the person he was brooding over. This is an inference from the text, since the poem never says who or what he has lost. Both "sky" and "die" return in the closing lines, but "sky" now gets the last word.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about moods. It does not argue that grief is foolish, and it does not claim nature teaches a grand lesson. Peace simply arrives, quietly, when the speaker looks outward instead of inward. The humour is a real strength: he can laugh at his own melodrama and still feel it was sincere. A poem that begins in sighing and ends in an exclamation of gladness, using almost the same words and rhymes, shows how a change of attention can change what the same words mean.