Henley's poem opens with a command that sounds more like a favour: "O gather me the rose, the rose." The little "me" is coaxing, and the doubled "rose" makes the line half spoken, half sung. Underneath is a very old argument, the carpe diem tradition that urges us to seize pleasure while it lasts (Herrick's "Gather ye rosebuds" is the best-known English example). What makes Henley's version distinctive is what it fears. Winter, it turns out, is not the real enemy. Regret is.
The first stanza lays out the seasonal logic in a few plain verbs: "summer smiles, but summer goes, / And winter waits behind it." Summer gets a face, and winter gets patience. Nothing dramatic has to happen for the rose to be lost; the cold only has to wait. The second stanza then moves the loss indoors. "The dream foregone" and "the deed foreborn" are the things we meant to do and never did, and the cluster of "fore-" sounds, ending in "forever," makes the missed chance feel permanent. Then the rose returns in disguise: "The worm Regret will canker on." A canker eats a bloom from within, so the flower we failed to pick is replaced by a creature feeding on us. Henley even gives Regret a gender ("him"), and the stiff, old-fashioned word order of "time will turn him never" pushes "never" to the end, where it lands like a verdict.
The third stanza is the speaker's answer, and it becomes personal at once: "So were it well to love, my love." The same word serves as verb and as endearment, so the general advice turns into an appeal to one listener. The remedy is love and laughter, and the odd phrasing "cheat of any laughter / The fate beneath us, and above" seems to mean robbing fate of its last laugh. Fate is pictured as something that surrounds us, "beneath us, and above," and "the dark before and after" suggests the nothingness on either side of a life. Judging by the imagery, human warmth is a small lit room between two darknesses.
The last stanza drops commands altogether and simply lists. Myrtle, traditionally a plant of love, stands with the rose, and the swallow, a summer bird that leaves, stands with the sunshine. Then come "the dream that comes, the wish that goes," and finally "the memories that follow!" The verbs "comes," "goes" and "follow" make time a procession, and the poem chooses where to stop. Having warned about the worm Regret, it ends with memory. By implication, the only thing we keep from a life is what we actually lived, and the exclamation mark makes that sound like a blessing.
The form supports this gentle persuasion. There are four quatrains rhyming ABAB, mostly in short, lilting lines of about four beats. Every second line ends on an unstressed syllable ("find it," "forever," "laughter," "swallow"), so the stanzas close with a falling, almost sighing cadence while the odd lines end firmly. The final stanza also revives the rhyme of the first, "rose" and "goes," so the poem ends where it began, a small circle that mirrors the turning year. The diction is simple, mostly one-syllable words with a few archaic touches, which keeps the tone close to a song.
The poem is significant because it takes a well-worn theme and finds a fresh emotional logic in it. Many carpe diem poems simply say that time is short. This one says that the cost of not acting outlasts the season itself, since winter passes but the worm "will canker on." It is also quietly generous. It does not scold; it asks, and it addresses someone it loves. Readers who know Henley mainly as the author of the defiant "Invictus" may find this a softer, more tender note, but the underlying conviction is similar: a life should be met, not postponed.