A walk through a field sounds like the calmest thing in the world, and Julie's "Violet Eyes" opens that way: a speaker, some grass, a light breeze. But the calm is only a surface. By line two the grass is swaying, and by line four the sway has been handed to someone else: "You used to sway with me." That one verb phrase carries the whole situation. The grass still moves, but the companion no longer walks beside the speaker. The poem never says why. Death, distance and a break-up are all possible, and the silence helps, because it lets the feeling stand without an explanation attached.
The poem is organised by tense more than by anything else. It begins in the present ("I walk"), slips into the past with "used to," sets "memories made" and "summers past" against "future memories," and ends on a wish. The speaker keeps leaning away from the present, the one tense in which the loved person is missing. The word "memories" appears twice, once looking back and once forward, and the move from "made" to "future" is the poem's quiet act of hope. Even so, the hope is thin: "I long for" is not "I will." The line that carries it, "Of walks through the grass," shrinks the grand "fields of grass" to a single ordinary patch, and it is the shortest line in the poem. The imagined future feels smaller than the remembered past.
The form is plain and carefully balanced. Twelve short lines run on without a break, most of them around six syllables, which gives a steady, walking pace. The longest, "I long for future memories," stretches toward something not yet there. There is no strict rhyme scheme, but in each group of four lines the even-numbered lines almost rhyme: breeze/me, past/grass, green/me. They are echoes rather than true rhymes, which suits a poem about incompleteness, since the sounds nearly meet and never quite do. Repetition does more of the work. "Grass" returns three times like a refrain, and line three repeats line one with one change, "I walk" becoming "Our walks." That single pronoun turns a lonely stroll into a shared memory. The word "me" ends line four and line twelve, so the poem begins its sense of togetherness and closes its wish on the speaker's own self: "with me" becomes "back to me."
The final quatrain changes the way the poem sees. After a wide view of fields and breeze, the focus drops to "two flowers" in "a sea of green." The word "sea" is worth noticing. For a poem about walking it suggests something larger and more isolating, a speaker adrift in a landscape that has become too big. Against that green, the violet is the only colour, and the poem gives it a startling turn: "Violet eyes watching." No "like" or "as" connects flowers to eyes; the metaphor simply arrives, as it might for someone who sees the lost person everywhere. "Violet" also works two ways, as a colour and, judging by the imagery, possibly as a flower name, though the poem leaves that open. Two flowers make two eyes, a small and exact detail. The eyes only watch, though. They do not answer, and the final line, "As I wish you back to me," shows the speaker still on the receiving end of silence.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It uses plain words (grass, breeze, green) and lets repetition, shifting tenses and one pronoun change carry the emotion. The structure also acts out the feeling it describes. Attention narrows from open fields to a pair of flowers, from "I" to "you," from the present to a wished-for future, much as grief narrows the world to whatever resembles the person who is gone. The poem also leaves a real question open: whether the speaker truly believes the flowers are watching, or only needs them to be. That uncertainty keeps the ending tender instead of sentimental.