Four lines are enough for Landor to describe a whole attitude to life: the world is full of beauty, it is given freely, and the right response is to honour it wherever it appears. The poem divides neatly in two. The first couplet shows God's generosity, and the second shows the speaker's answering devotion.
The opening line sets up an equation that the rest of the poem depends on: "God scatters beauty as he scatters flowers." The verb "scatters" appears twice, so beauty and flowers become one and the same kind of gift. Scattering is an easy, almost careless action, like a sower throwing seed or a child tossing petals, and it suggests abundance that doesn't count the cost. Nobody scatters what is scarce. The next line widens the view with "O'er the wide earth", where the contracted "O'er" and the open vowel sounds of "wide" help the line stretch outward. Then comes the quiet surprise: God "tells us all are ours." The word "all" is pleasantly vague. It can mean every flower, every beautiful thing, every place where beauty turns up. The rhyme of "flowers" with "ours" ties the gift to its recipients, so that beauty is shared out and not rationed. The poem gives no hint that some people are entitled to it and others are not.
The second couplet changes setting. We leave the open earth for buildings, and the flowers give way to flames: "A hundred lights in every temple burn." The arithmetic is generous again. It isn't one light but a hundred, and not one temple but "every" one. The plural "temple" matters, because the poem refuses to name a single religion. A reader might take this as an openness to different faiths, with each temple holding its own lights and none outshining the rest. That reading is an inference from the wording, but the text supports it, since the speaker visits every shrine and never picks one. A second reading is also possible, in which the "temples" are the many places where beauty is honoured or found. The poem's wording allows both.
The first person appears only in the last line, and the effect is striking. For three lines God is the subject and the speaker stays out of sight. When "I" finally arrives, it comes with a physical gesture of humility: "at each shrine I bend my knee in turn." Kneeling is the opposite of scattering. God's giving is wide and loose, while the speaker's response is deliberate and orderly. "In turn" suggests patience and fairness, a worshipper moving from one altar to the next without hurrying or favouring any of them. "Each" echoes the earlier "every" and "all", so the language of the last line answers the language of the first.
The form matches this balance. The poem is written in iambic pentameter, and its two rhyming couplets (flowers/ours, burn/turn) give it the tidy, closed feel of an epigram. The rhythm is mostly smooth and unforced, as in "And AT each SHRINE I BEND my KNEE in TURN", which moves with the steady calm of the devotion it describes. The line "O'er the wide earth, and tells us all are ours" is slightly more crowded, with a pause after "earth" and a little weight on "wide", and so it feels more spacious. Rhyming couplets also suit the subject, because each pair completes a thought and the two pairs mirror each other: giving, then receiving.
The poem is significant because of how much generosity of spirit it fits into so small a space. It makes no argument and no sermon, and it doesn't set one belief against another. It makes a simple claim, that beauty is a gift distributed widely and so should be met with reverence wherever it is found, and it makes the claim gracefully. Its tolerance feels natural, not preached. The poem is also easy to read in a way that rewards a second look. On the surface it describes flowers and candles, but underneath it proposes that wonder is a form of worship, and that a person who is open to beauty in all its forms is, in the fullest sense, a devout one.