The hills are going dark before the speaker has finished saying goodbye. Scott's poem is a leave-taking addressed to a harp, the "Minstrel Harp" of the Scottish North, which stands for the poet's own art. It is set at dusk. Purple peaks darken, a glow-worm lights "her spark," and deer, "half-seen," slip toward cover. Nothing is stated outright, but the fading light prepares us for an ending.
The first stanza sends the harp back to nature. "Resume thy wizard elm!" is an order, but a gentle one. The speaker hands the instrument back to the tree it hangs in, where the fountain and "the wild breeze" can play it, and the breeze's "wilder minstrelsy" is said to beat any human player. The stanza ends by gathering sounds: "distant echo from the fold and lea," the herd-boy's pipe, the "hum of housing bee." The long final line has a drowsy sound, with its soft h and m. It makes poetry seem like one more evening noise, not something a poet owns.
The second stanza turns to the speaker's own feelings, and the tone becomes humbler and more serious. He dismisses critics ("censure sharp") who might "idly cavil at an idle lay," and the repeated *idle* shrugs off both the attack and, half-ironically, his own verse. Then comes the stanza's real confession. The harp has helped him through "secret woes the world has never known." The pile-up of comparatives, "weary night dawned wearier day, / And bitterer was the grief devoured alone," makes the misery feel as if it is deepening. Nothing in the poem says what these woes were, and it is better not to guess. What matters is the claim in the last line: that he survives them at all is the harp's doing. Calling it "Enchantress" turns the harp into something close to a muse, a power he serves and owes.
The final stanza is the most inventive, because the farewell is acted out and not only announced. As the speaker walks away, the harp sounds without him. The word "now" keeps returning, as the music changes and then thins: "'Tis now a seraph bold, with touch of fire, / 'Tis now the brush of Fairy's frolic wing." The harp is first grand and fiery, then light and playful. Then the sound drifts off: "Receding now, the dying numbers ring / Fainter and fainter down the rugged dell." Even the syntax thins out. The sentences get shorter, and "witch-note of the distant spell" shrinks the music to a single wandering note. The stanza ends with "And now, 'tis silent all!", with the exclamation and the pause in the line leaving a gap where sound used to be. The farewell then comes round again, closing with "Enchantress, fare thee well!" The poem both starts and finishes on goodbye, so the frame is a loop of leaving.
The form supports this slow retreat. Each stanza has nine lines and rhymes *ababbcbcc*, the pattern of the Spenserian stanza. Eight lines of iambic pentameter run steadily, and the ninth is longer by one foot, an alexandrine. Because the rhymes keep returning (*-ending* four times in the first stanza), the verse seems to circle back as the speaker looks over his shoulder. The extra-long last line works like a held breath, or a last look before turning away. Each stanza ends on that slower, wider note, and the third makes the most of it by ending in silence.
Scott's poem is significant for how it handles a poet's goodbye to his own art. The speaker doesn't boast or make a grand statement. He is modest about his "feeble sway," grateful for a gift he doesn't claim to have earned, and ready to let the music go back to the wind and the elm. The harp is never fully his. It belongs to the hills, the bees, and the dusk, and the final silence is gentle, because the music was only ever borrowed from them.