Frost begins by shooing away the very people a love poem usually courts. "Lovers, forget your love," he says, and asks them to "list", to listen, to a courtship between a houseplant and the weather. The joke is gentle, but what follows is serious: a love story in which almost nothing happens, and that scarcity of event is the point.
The two lovers belong to opposite worlds. She is indoors, among the "firelit looking-glass" and "warm stove-window light". He is "a winter wind, / Concerned with ice and snow", whose usual company is "dead weeds and unmated birds". Frost fills the room with small domestic details. When noon melts the "frosty window veil", the frost on the glass reads almost like a bridal veil lifted. A "cagèd yellow bird" hangs "over her in tune", a canary, we guess, singing above the plant like a musician at a wedding. The accented "cagèd" slows the line and takes some of the carefree sweetness out of the song. There is a quiet irony here. Indoors the bird is caged but singing, and outdoors the birds are free but alone. Each world offers something and takes something away.
The wind's behaviour is drawn with great tenderness. "He marked her through the pane, / He could not help but mark": the repetition makes his attention involuntary. By day he "only passed her by", and only "at dark" does he return. The wind who "little of love could know" is the one who "sighed upon the sill" and "gave the sash a shake". Frost builds the courtship out of what a wind really does to a house, so the sigh and the rattle are both weather and wooing. The sleepless people inside, "witness all within", hear a draught. The poem asks us to hear a proposal.
The ending is where the poem becomes subtle. "Perchance he half prevailed" is a hedge, as if the narrator can only guess at what passed between them. The wind hopes "to win her for the flight", and "flight" suggests elopement, though a rooted plant can hardly fly. The flower "leaned aside / And thought of naught to say." Is she tempted, frightened, content, or simply unable? The poem won't tell us. Leaning aside is also what a plant does in a draught, so her refusal is human and botanical at once. By morning the breeze is "a hundred miles away", and there is no quarrel, no explanation, and no complaint. The silence is the whole reply.
The form supports this lightness. The poem has seven quatrains, and only the second and fourth lines of each rhyme: "these/breeze", "noon/tune", "mark/dark", "snow/know", "shake/awake", "flight/light", "say/away". The unrhymed first and third lines leave each stanza slightly open, which suits a love only "half" won. The rhymes are plain one-syllable words, and the lines run to about three beats each, with a skipping, ballad-like rhythm. That nursery-rhyme lilt keeps the mood playful and stops the cold parting from turning mournful. It also makes the closing lines hit harder, because the tune is so light. Even the word "breeze", which closes the first stanza, comes back in the last, so the wind we met at the start is the one the morning finds gone. A faint pun may be at work too. "List" can also mean to lean, which is exactly what the flower does at the end. That is an inference, but it fits the poem's habit of folding small meanings into plain words.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. Frost takes a windowsill, a stove and a canary, the furniture of an ordinary winter room, and uses it to ask whether two beings of different natures can love each other when one is made to stay and the other to roam. He never states a moral. He lets the personification stay playful while the situation stings a little. The "Lovers" of the first line imagine love as union. This small fable suggests love can be real, even persistent, and still go nowhere because of what each creature is. The poem says so in the plain, speech-like language Frost is known for, and with a sidelong glance rather than a sermon.