Nobody in this poem gives an order. Every sentence opens with the same humble phrase, "Let me," and it comes round six times in twelve lines, once at the start of each couplet. June Mcarthur builds "A second chance" almost entirely from this one repeated request. The speaker keeps asking, gently and in slightly different ways, because the answer is not guaranteed.
The situation is easy to piece together from the text. A speaker is addressing a partner with whom love has cooled, and wants to begin again. The central idea is that a second chance can't be taken, only given. The speaker never claims the right to be forgiven or welcomed back, and simply asks for permission, over and over.
The requests also grow in size. The poem begins with small, physical gestures: holding a hand, whispering, saying "I love you once again." By the middle it is asking for something much larger, to "rekindle a romance we once shared," and it ends by asking to love "now, as I loved you then." The speaker moves from touch to the whole shape of a relationship. The poem never says what the whispered "things of day's gone by" actually are. The memories stay private, which makes the couple feel real, and lets any reader fill the gap with their own.
The most striking line is the plainest: "and the passion, now growing cold." Many love poems of this kind would flatter the beloved, but this speaker admits the damage. The word choice is careful, though. "Rekindle" belongs to the language of fire, and "cold" is what a fire becomes when it is neglected. Because the passion is "growing" cold rather than "gone" cold, the process still seems reversible. The flame has burned low, but the speaker believes it is not out.
Place does a lot of the emotional work. The poem names "the Scottish Glens" and "our Highland Hame," and "Hame," the Scots word for home, is the only dialect word in the poem. It arrives exactly when the speaker says "Let me take you back," and it makes the invitation sound warmer and more intimate than "home" would. The poem suggests that the love and the landscape are bound together, so returning to one means returning to the other. The image of "mountains meet the sky" fits this too. A horizon is a place where two separate things join, which is just what the speaker hopes for. It also echoes the earlier wish to "hold you high above all else," so height runs through the poem as a sign of devotion.
The form is loose but musical. The long lines carry roughly four beats and the shorter, indented lines roughly three, a pattern close to song or ballad, which suits the old-fashioned phrasing of "days of old." Only the short lines rhyme: "again" and "Glens" make a near rhyme (especially if "again" is said the way it often is in Britain, to sound like "agen"), then "old" and "cold" rhyme fully, and finally "sky" and "try." The sound grows more settled as the poem goes on, as if the speaker gains confidence. The long lines stay unrhymed, like the speaker's unplanned, tumbling speech, and the short lines click shut after them.
The ending is the poem's cleverest move. The last rhyme lands on "try," a modest word. The speaker does not ask to succeed or to be forgiven, only to make an attempt. And the final line introduces the poem's only "if": "if you love me, let me try." Everything before it is plea, and here the whole poem turns out to depend on the other person's feelings, which it never reports. We never hear an answer. The poem stops with the speaker still waiting.
The poem is not technically elaborate, and its strength lies elsewhere: in plain speech, in one repeated phrase that carries real feeling, and in the courage of admitting that love has faded. For students, it shows how repetition can build emotion and how a small word like "if" can change the weight of an entire poem.