Before it says a word about love, the poem has already put a whole working day to bed. Thomas Campbell speaks directly to the evening star, and the first thing he credits it with is a kind of gentle management of the world: it "bringest home the bee" and "sett'st the weary labourer free." The insect and the worker share a sentence, as if they were finishing the same shift. The central idea is that evening is a homecoming, and that its peace reaches even people who cannot get home, the parted lovers of the last stanza, who are carried there by memory.
The opening stanza also makes a quietly clever comparison. The star is asked to appear "when Heaven's breath and brow / Are sweet as hers we love." The sky is given a breath (the evening air, I'd guess) and a forehead, so dusk becomes a face, and the face of someone loved. The plain pronoun "we" draws the reader in without fuss. The speaker is also cautious: "If any star shed peace, 'tis thou." He does not claim the star is magic, only that if peace falls from the sky, this is where it comes from. That modesty keeps the tone from turning gushy.
The second stanza slows down and lets the senses take over. "Luxuriant skies" is a surprising phrase, since "luxuriant" normally describes thick, growing vegetation, so sky and ground seem to melt into one lush thing. Then the senses arrive one at a time: smell ("the landscape's odours rise"), hearing ("far-off lowing herds," "songs, when toil is done") and finally sight. The last image holds stillness and movement together. Smoke from the cottages is "unstirred," with no wind to disturb it, yet it still "curls yellow in the sun." Notice, too, that the herds are "far-off." Sounds are softened by distance, as they are at dusk, and "cottages" in the plural suggests a whole community winding down at once.
The form supports this settling feeling. Every stanza rhymes aabcbc: a chiming couplet, then two interlaced pairs, such as "thou" with "brow" and "above" with "love." The lines also alternate in length. Longer lines carry the thought forward, and shorter ones ("That send'st it from above," "Are sweet as hers we love") close it, so each stanza seems to exhale at the end. The rhythm is light and lilting, and lines like "Star that bringest home the bee" put the stress on "Star" at once, as if the speaker were hailing it across a field. Forms like "bringest" and "send'st" give the address a formal, almost prayer-like tone, though the subject stays warmly domestic.
The final stanza turns inward. "Interviews" here means meetings, and "muse" means to think deeply, so lovers who are apart look at the same star and think of one another. Calling the star a "remembrancer," a reminder, makes it a kind of shared memory aid hung in the sky. The evening star is traditionally linked with Venus, goddess of love. The poem never says so, but the stanza seems to lean on that association. The vows are "too delicious to be riven / By absence from the heart." "Riven" is a violent word, meaning split or torn apart, in an otherwise soft poem. Absence is the one threat the poem admits, and it is allowed to lose.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it covers in eighteen lines. It begins with a bee, moves out across fields, herds and chimney smoke, and ends inside a single heart. The movement runs from the many to the two, from outer scene to inner feeling. The star that took the workers home turns out to be doing the same for the lovers, only the home it brings them to is not a place but the memory of a person.