Three times the speaker tells us what he did: "I watched." He never says "I joined" or "I spoke." The poem is built around that distance. A figure gathers goldenrod, swims in a forest, sits with hands on knees, and the speaker takes it all in from the edge, unable to step into the picture. The central idea seems to be a contrast between a person who simply is, absorbed in a physical moment, and a watcher who can only measure, wait and worry about time.
The vocabulary sorts itself into two camps. On one side stand "scientist," "laboratory," "experimenters" and "count of dreams," the language of observation and measurement. On the other are "fields," "forest," "heaths and moors," "wet grass." The beloved figure is placed in both. She "breathe[s] like a scientist," and her breath turns into a "count of dreams," as if even sleep could be tallied. Yet she also smells "as sweet as the second-hand books you / throw away." That image is neat and odd. Old books carry a sweet, papery scent and a sense of stored knowledge, but she discards them. Judging by the imagery, she holds a kind of ease the speaker lacks, and she doesn't hoard what he might treasure.
The third stanza is the speaker's confession, and its rhythm shows his state of mind. Three sentences begin "And I cannot": walk around the laboratory, rest my fingers, stay in when the sun is out. The repeated "And" makes the lines feel compulsive, like pacing. It is also a restless mind pulled two ways, toward the lab and toward the sunlight. Just before this comes a quietly eerie line, "the caverns in the earth are not singing," which suggests that something expected, a hidden music, has gone silent.
Then the poem changes direction. "I used to think you were a gift" is in the past tense, and what follows is a list of men: those "fighting for their home," those who "cry on the heaths and moors," those who "fall in the underground," those who "wait for us when the clock stops." Each "Or the men who…" pushes the poem further from the field and toward loss and endings. The pronoun in the last of these is worth noticing. It is the only "us" in the poem, and it pulls the lonely watcher into a shared mortality. The clock stops for everyone. The poem doesn't say what the speaker now believes about the woman, but the broken past tense implies that an earlier, grander idea of her, as a prize or a rescue, has fallen away.
The form is free verse with no rhyme, and its music comes from repetition and from line breaks that hesitate. Lines end on small, unstressed words: "the," "you," "a gift to the / experimenters." The reader has to wait for the noun, which is exactly what the watcher is doing. Stanzas run three, four, four, three, three, three, and then a single line.
That last line is the payoff. The opening scene returns almost word for word, but it has been changed. Now "the sun was escaping from your hair" and "your feet were deep in the wet grass." Sunlight is loosened and the body is rooted in the earth. The final line, "And your arms were filled with goldenrod," is a stanza of its own, and its verb is "filled," the opposite of all those "cannot"s. The speaker's hands cannot rest, while hers are full. Goldenrod blooms late in the warm season, so the flower may also carry a faint sense of ripeness on the edge of fading, though the poem never says so outright.
The poem is significant for the way it holds so much in so little. Instead of announcing a theme, it sets a plain, golden image against the heavy machinery of science, war and time, and lets the image win by staying simple. After all the lists and the "cannot"s, the gathered flowers are what is left, and they are enough to make the reader see why the speaker keeps watching.