Morris opens with a command that sounds almost reckless: "Love is enough: have no thought for to-morrow." Yet the rest of the stanza undercuts any easy comfort. The lovers addressed here have "paid for [their] bliss with great sorrow," and the speaker promises that "as it was once so it shall be again." Pain will return, with its "feeble hands" reaching for "hands that would help but they may not." The poem does not say love cancels suffering. It says that the moment of fulfilment is worth having even inside a cycle of loss, and that is why the advice to forget tomorrow is so daring.
The second stanza turns on the word "Till." After despair comes a change in which "words your lips say not / Your hearts make all plain." Understanding no longer needs speech. What follows is a long list of negatives in the third stanza: no mocking morning, no weary nightfall, and a sea that "strayeth not." Morris builds happiness out of things that are no longer wrong. The wind "is not helpless for any man's need," and rain falls "but for thistle and weed." Even the weeds are included, so the renewed world seems to leave nothing out. The landscape, which the lovers once thought "waning," now answers their feelings, though the poem implies it is their feelings that have changed.
The verse form suits this mixture of tenderness and doubt. Each stanza has five lines rhymed *ababb*, and the final couplet-like pair of rhymes gives each stanza a settling, closing effect. Lines one and three use feminine rhymes (tomorrow/sorrow, weary/dreary, hidden/unbidden), which leave the voice trailing off softly. The rhythm is a loose, rolling triple beat, with long lines that carry four main stresses and several unstressed syllables between them. It sounds like a chant or lullaby, appropriate for something titled a "song." In the second stanza, "may not" and "say not" rhyme on the same small word, and the repeated "not" makes the sense of inability hang in the air.
Morris also uses archaic diction ("ye," "nigh," "Lo") to give the voice a ceremonial, almost prophetic tone. The speaker seems to bless the lovers from above. Yet the fourth stanza admits a limit: sorrow is hidden "this morning," battle is hushed "for this even at least." That "at least" is quietly honest, since the peace lasts only a day. The lovers sit "silent… midst the world's tale increased," a phrase suggesting that their happiness adds one more story to the world's store of stories.
The fifth stanza widens the view to "lovers unloved," those who lack love and come near for a blessing. The lovers' happiness feeds their "dreaming," and the stanza gives that dreaming three times of day: "dreams of the day," "dreams of the night," "dreams of the dawn." The last of these is where "death and hope strive." That struggle is the poem's real subject. Love here is not private pleasure but something others live on, a source of hope in a world that keeps threatening to end.
The final stanza changes the pronouns. The distant "ye" becomes "we," and then, at the very end, "my love's feet and me." The speaker steps into the picture, and the large claim becomes a personal one. Earth, "threatened often," will "live on for ever that such things may be." The dry seed quickens, hard ground softens, and spring birds cross the sea. Behind these images is a reversal of the usual logic. We might say love depends on the world surviving, but Morris suggests the world survives so that love may happen. The closing image, "earth's garden may bloom round my love's feet and me," is domestic and tiny after all that scale, and perhaps unsurprising from a writer remembered as much for designs full of plants as for verse.
The poem matters because it holds two things together without letting either win. It admits that grief repeats, and it still insists that one hour of shared happiness justifies the world's endurance. Because the poem ends on a question ("what shall we say then, but…?"), that faith sounds like a hope the speaker is still working out.