Smiles fade fast; anger lingers. Landor's eight lines open with that small, uncomfortable observation and spend the rest of their length proving it with weather and sky. The title, "The Evening Star," promises something romantic, the first bright light of dusk. What arrives is closer to a verdict: love is changeable, hate is constant, and the winds and stars are called in as witnesses.
The first stanza argues from the weather. Smiles "soon abate," a phrase whose soft s sounds thin out as you say it, while the "boisterous throes" of anger "burst forth" with heavy, plosive b's. The phrase "long burst forth" is slightly odd, but it seems to mean that anger keeps breaking out and does not spend itself quickly. Then the poem moves from people to wind. The south wind blows "inconstantly," the north "steadily." Landor never says that south stands for smiles and north for anger. The usual associations of a warm, shifting south wind and a cold, set north one do that work for him. Even the adverbs behave as described: "inconstantly" wobbles over its syllables, and "steadily" lands plainly.
The second stanza lifts the argument from earth to heaven and names what the first only implied. "Thy star, O Venus!" is the poem's one moment of direct address, and it gives the lines a ceremonial, classical tone. Venus is the goddess of love, and her star "often changes / Its radiant seat above." "Seat" suggests a throne, and "radiant" is a compliment, so love is shown as beautiful and unreliable at once. Against it stands the pole-star, which "never ranges," a verb that suggests roaming or wandering. It also gets the poem's most loaded adjective: "chilling." Steadiness is normally a virtue, but here it belongs to the emotion that freezes. That is where the quiet irony lives. Hate is faithful in the only way hate can be.
The astronomy is accurate, which helps. Venus does shift its place in the sky from one evening to the next, and the pole-star stays almost fixed while the heavens turn. A claim about human feeling borrows the authority of a natural fact.
The form is neat and compact. Both stanzas are rhymed quatrains, ABAB, with longer lines alternating with shorter ones in a ballad-like rhythm. The pulse is mostly iambic, steady enough to feel like a proverb. The rhymes carry meaning too. "Forth" and "north" tie anger to the cold wind. "Above" and "Love" put love up in the sky, high and out of reach. And "changes" and "ranges," with their soft two-syllable endings, rhyme with each other even though the sense pushes them apart. The star that moves and the star that does not are bound together by sound. The last line also reverses the order of the stanza. Venus came first and the pole-star second, but the closing phrase is "Hate and Love," so the poem ends on the word it has just shown to be unreliable.
The poem is also open to argument, which is part of its interest. The first stanza compares smiles with anger, which are passing expressions, and the second leaps to love and hate themselves. Is a vanished smile really the same as vanished love? A sceptical reader might say that Landor has stacked the evidence, choosing images that flatter his conclusion. But that is how an epigram works. It offers a claim, one clean proof, and a sting in the final line, and it leaves you to decide whether it is true. In eight short lines, the poem makes a bleak idea about human nature feel as if it were written into the sky.