The speaker is caught by a painful pattern: the loveliest things vanish quickly. Morning light, sun, wind-tossed leaves, blossom—each is gorgeous and already passing. That brevity makes beauty ache, as if pleasure is always shadowed by loss. The question “Must all be brief, being fair?” captures the mood: wistful, almost fragile, and longing for something that won’t disappear.
Then the poem shifts. The night sky offers a different kind of beauty. The stars are “fair beyond all things fair,” yet they wheel and march unchanged—bright, grave, and constant. They do not bloom and blow away. Only they, and perhaps the mind’s imagining of them, remain. The speaker moves from sorrow at fleeting earthly loveliness to quiet wonder at what endures.