A reverie is a drifting, dreamy kind of thinking, and the poem begins as if it will be one. Summer has "fled," the "face of Nature doth seem dead," and the leaves fall in a "nipping and chilling autumnal breeze." Yet by the fourth stanza the speaker has stopped musing and started preaching. The cold birds turn out to be a doorway into the real subject, which is human hardship and the failure of the comfortable to do anything about it.
The pivot comes in a surprising line: the birds, we are told, "are more contented than the children of God, / As long as they can pick up a worm from the sod." The comparison is bitterly ironic. A bird is satisfied with "a stale crust of bread or a grain of wheat," while people made in God's image cannot count on even that. From here the poem slides from one set of shivering creatures to another in a single sentence: "Oh! Think of the little birds in the time of the snow, / Also of the little street waifs." The word "little" keeps returning, and in the last stanza the news-vendors are called "such creatures," echoing the "feathered creatures" of the second. The echo quietly asks us to see these children as vulnerable and overlooked, much as we see the birds.
After that the circle widens. We meet the "wandering poor" begging "from door to door," then the unemployed working man with "a wife and family, perhaps four or two." That casual "perhaps" gives him a believable ordinariness. This stanza is the poem's most thoughtful moment. The speaker does not condemn the man who might "steal / Bread for his family" but explains the pressure that could drive him there, since the thought alone is "enough to drive the poor man mad." Stanza ten generalises the point: hunger is hard to hide, and few can control their tempers when they "cannot find anything to eat."
The accusation lands hardest on religious hypocrisy. This is a "boasted Christian land," where the rich "are told to be kind to the poor," yet "rather incline their money to hoard." The reference to those who give to the poor lending "unto the Lord" draws on a well-known biblical idea, and the poet uses it as a rebuke. The verb "told" matters here, because the rich have heard the command and ignore it. Words like "Heaven's sake" and "God's command" make the neglect a moral failing as well as a social one.
Formally, the poem is twelve quatrains, mostly in rhyming couplets: fled/dead, poor/door, do/two. The lines are long and loose, with no steady beat, and the rhymes often seem to steer the sentence rather than follow it. "Just, for instance, a stale crust of bread or a grain of wheat" sounds like speech stretched until it reaches "eat." In stanza ten the pattern collapses altogether (hide, control, fate, eat), and the final stanza rhymes "street" with "street." Such roughness gives the poem the sound of someone talking urgently, more concerned to be heard than to be graceful. The repeated "Alas!" and the commands "Oh! Think of" and "Besides think of" work like a preacher's refrain, making the reader responsible for what is described.
The ending is abrupt. The speaker offers no prayer, comfort or solution, only a picture of the rich who, on seeing barefoot boys, "make a sudden retreat." After a poem that has told us repeatedly to "think," the closing image shows what many do instead, which is look away.
The poem is worth studying because it shows a poet turning a seasonal subject into social protest, and because it shows how form and feeling pull against each other. The rhythms stumble and the phrasing can be clumsy, but the moral anger is clear in every stanza. The poem works through plain repetition and a steady widening of sympathy, from birds to waifs to workers, until the reader is left facing the question of who is willing to look.