Happiness in Barnes's poem slips away and yet keeps coming back. In two nine-line stanzas, one set by a summer stream and the other at a Christmas dance, William Barnes lets the second scene revive the first. The word that carries the idea is "fleeten". In summer the signs of the speaker's joy are "zoo fleeten", and in winter the night itself is "too fleeten". Joy passes quickly both times, but the closing lines insist that it can be "brought anew".
The construction is more careful than the easy, singing surface suggests. Each stanza is a single sentence, and the first holds back its main clause almost to the end. It begins "When I led by zummer streams / The pride o' Lea, as naighbours thought her", the girl the neighbours admire, and the grammar waits through the sunset before the final couplet says what happened: the natural "tokens" of the speaker's joy "heightened it, that happy meeten". The wait is broken by three short lines that share one rhyme: "Winds a-blowen, / Streams a-flowen, / Skies a-glowen." After the longer lines these come as quick, almost breathless beats. The dialect prefix *a-* makes each action seem to go on happening, as if the scene is held in place. The rhyme scheme (ababcccdd) is the same in both stanzas. Most of the rhymes have soft double endings, such as "thought her" and "water", "dances" and "glances", "fleeten" and "meeten". They give the verse a gentle, unhurried fall at each line's end.
The imagery shows how the two scenes mirror each other. In summer the focus is the outdoor world, with evening beams casting "sheades athirt the water" (across it) and glowing skies. These things are more than scenery. They are "tokens", outward signs that match what the speaker feels. In winter the focus moves indoors to people: "merry feaces", "kindly smiles an' glisnen glances". Yet the light has not gone. It has moved from the sky into the dancers' eyes, and "glowen" skies become "glisnen" glances. The sky is still there too, with "Stars a-winken", a nicely playful detail because the stars seem to join in the flirtation going on below. Even the shadows come back. The "sheades" that lay across the summer water return as "Sheades a-zinken" while the "day a-shrinken" fades. The scenery of one season is quietly rebuilt in the other.
The structure also makes a small paradox. A winter night is long, and the poem has just told us the day is shrinking, yet the dance makes it "too fleeten". Time feels short when we are happy, whatever the calendar says. The closing couplets also reverse their rhyme words. Stanza one ends "fleeten, / … meeten" and stanza two ends "meeten, / … fleeten", like a reflection. The poem's shape repeats the idea that an earlier happiness returns in a new form, and the "happy meeten" is not replaced but "brought anew". The poem never says directly that the speaker is remembering, and its feeling stays mostly understated. The phrase "happy meeten" is plain, and the feeling comes through the weather, the light and the music of the lines.
Barnes wrote in the Dorset dialect, and here the spelling puts the sound of speech on the page. "Zummer" and "zun" have the voiced *z* of West Country speech, "meake" and "feaces" stretch their vowels, and "jay" and "ov" are spoken forms of joy and of. A reader has to slow down and listen, which suits a poem about the pleasure of lingering in a moment. The dialect also treats country courtship, neighbours' opinions and village Christmas dances as worthy of lyric poetry. The poem is short and simple on the surface, but it shows that a local voice can hold a large thought: the seasons turn and time runs on, yet a joy once felt can be called back when the right light, the right company and the right night come round again.