Bonta starts by correcting a name. Dutchman's breeches look like little pairs of upside-down trousers, but the speaker insists they're really a yellowed tooth that a bumblebee drills for nectar. From there the poem piles up other ways people have seen the flower: as hats, white hearts, earrings, even butterfly collections. Seeing, it suggests, depends on who is looking.
Then the tone sharpens. "It's useful to know what you're looking at," the speaker says, and the next images show why. Wasps cheat by chewing a hole to steal nectar, and a crab spider waits disguised as one more blossom, its legs set like a trap. Beauty and danger sit side by side. The last two stanzas widen the view with folk uses: a love charm, and a farmers' name, staggerweed, for the plant's effect on cattle. The mood is curious and observant, gently humorous at first, then quietly wary. The speaker clearly loves the flower but doesn't want to sentimentalize it.