The poem begins like a casual tour, with a speaker pointing out plants to a visitor: "These here are bluebells." Nothing about the voice is polished. "Here's daisies" bends grammar the way people do in easy speech, and "Gram," "Mother" and "Daddy" sound like a child's words for family, though the speaker's talk of being gone one day suggests someone older. That mix of plain voice and quietly large thoughts drives the whole poem. It starts out about flowers and ends up about how the dead might still reach the living.
The first few lines set up a world where the ordinary and the uncanny sit side by side. The fairies "ring" the bluebells at night, and the speaker hears them "when there's no wind." The claim is stated flatly, as a fact of the garden, with no sign the speaker expects to be doubted. This calm matters later. By the time "Strange things happen" arrives, the reader has already accepted that this is a place where listening closely might reveal something.
The center of the poem is the contrast between two kinds of flower. The daisies "come up volunteer," a gardener's phrase for plants that seed themselves, and the speaker lets them be. The peonies are different. They are loved because "they stay put," and they were planted deliberately: Gram "came down and planted them / after Mother married Daddy. / She wanted her to have something pretty." The plain, unadorned line about wanting something pretty carries a lot of tenderness. Planting here is a gesture of care between generations, a gift from one woman to her daughter, and its meaning is easy to read. (Judging by the context, Gram is the mother's mother.) The peonies will "likely" outlast the speaker, too, and the speaker's quick "but who can say for sure?" is the first crack in all this certainty.
The black hollyhocks are the opposite of the peonies. No one planted them, so nobody gave them. The speaker keeps digging them up, and "back they come." The verbs are blunt and repetitive, almost a small struggle. Here the poem turns on an irony. The peonies are a message anyone can understand, and the hollyhocks are one the speaker can't. Their darkness, too, sets them apart from the pretty, cultivated flowers elsewhere in the garden. The speaker blames Gram: "I think it's Gram, / trying to tell me something." The poem never says Gram has died, but the suggestion that the hollyhocks are a message from her points that way. That is an inference, though a strong one.
The poem's form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are short, mostly end-stopped, and follow the pace of someone talking while walking through a garden. The small spoken phrases "of course" and "likely" and "who can say for sure" make it sound unrehearsed. The words that point to place are repeated: "these here," "here's," "been here longer than me," "those … there." They map the garden and also the speaker's sense of belonging in it. The family has been rooted in this spot for a long time, and the speaker is only one of its latest members.
The ending is brief and unresolved: "but I can't make out what." The speaker stops there, with the question still open. One more contradiction is worth noticing. The speaker wants to understand the message but keeps digging up the thing that carries it. This could be impatience, or an unwillingness to be pulled back into a past the speaker half wants to leave behind. The poem doesn't say, and I think that's deliberate.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it carries in so few words. It doesn't lecture about memory or inheritance. It shows them as work done in a garden, where love is planted, tended and sometimes pulled up, and where the dead may be speaking without being understood. The final image suggests that being close to someone doesn't guarantee understanding them, even when the message keeps returning.