Early spring, a roadside bank: hepatica flowers have just opened, and just above them lies a dead porcupine, with carrion beetles crawling through its quills. Butterflies gather around what remains of its mouth, ignoring the blossoms. The speaker simply watches, noting the strange closeness of beauty and decay, though the poem never states a judgment outright.
The middle lines admit how far apart life and death seem, even though the snow has barely gone. Then the poem looks ahead. The old rusty leaves are sinking into the earth and will soon be unreadable. The "doctrine of signatures" was the old belief that a plant's shape signals what it can heal, and the leaf of the hepatica was thought to resemble the liver. The ending, with its dreams of snakes, hints at human fears and remedies. The mood is calm, observant, and quietly wry. Nature carries on, indifferent to our meanings.