Some of the most revealing things people say about each other are tiny. Two lines, two smells and two seasons are all Bai gives us, and the title does the rest. «We go together apparently» sounds less like a title than a remark dropped into conversation, half shrug and half surprise. The poem then lays out its evidence, and at first the evidence seems to point the other way.
Look at what each person likes. The speaker loves lilac "in the winter"; the other person loves mint "in the spring." Lilac is a flower we tie to spring, so wanting its smell in winter means wanting something that isn't there. The poem doesn't say whether it is remembered, bottled or simply hoped for, but the wish itself reaches across the calendar. Mint, by contrast, is a cool, sharp, green smell, and "you" enjoys it in the season of fresh green things, right where it belongs. One preference is about absence and the other is about presence. It would be easy to read the speaker as the dreamer and the "you" as the person at ease in the present, though the poem only hints at this and never states it.
The construction explains why the pair still feels like a pair. Both lines run on the same machinery: pronoun, "like the smell of," a plant, "in the," a season. Only the pronoun, the plant and the season change. This sameness of grammar is the poem's quiet argument. The two people are built on the same frame even though what fills it differs. We are shown two sentences that match in shape and clash in content, and we feel the "going together" before the title's claim has fully registered.
The sound works the same way. There is no end rhyme, and "winter" and "spring" don't chime, which suits a poem about things that aren't identical. But the short "i" runs through both lines, in "in," "winter," "mint" and "spring," and it binds them more tightly than a rhyme would. The rhythm is uneven in a way that feels deliberate. The speaker's line stretches to eleven syllables, with "Lilac in the winter" trailing off in a soft, lingering way, while the reply shrinks to nine and ends on the clipped, quick word "spring." The longer, slower line suits the sweetness of lilac and the shorter one suits the crispness of mint, though that may be a happy accident of reading rather than a plan. A smaller quirk is the capital L in "Lilac" against the lowercase "mint." It gives the flower a slight formality, almost the weight of a name, though the poem never explains it.
The order of the seasons matters too. Winter comes first and spring second, so reading the poem means moving forward through the year, from cold to thaw. The speaker's season hands over to the other person's, and together they cover a whole turn of weather. The phrase "go together" works in two senses here. It can mean a couple, though the poem never uses a word like love. It can also mean the way flavours or colours match. The poem leaves us to do the matching, and that is part of the pleasure.
Then there is the word "apparently." It deflates any grand romantic claim and keeps the tone light and a little amused. No one announces a soulmate; someone notices, perhaps with mild surprise, that the evidence adds up. The hedge makes the feeling more believable, because it sounds like how people really speak when they are fond of someone.
The poem is worth reading for how much it gets out of so little. It builds closeness from small sensory tastes instead of declarations, and it chooses smell, a sense we often link with memory and longing. It suggests that being well matched doesn't mean wanting the same things at the same time. It can mean that your wants and someone else's fit together, season after season.