"A molehill is her throne" does a great deal of work by standing completely alone. Before we meet a single detail of the scene, the poem has fixed its scale: this is a kingdom measured in moss and cobweb. The names Titania and Oberon point us to Shakespeare's *A Midsummer Night's Dream*, where they are the queen and king of the fairies. Peter John Dean borrows them for something stiller than a play, though. His Titania isn't quarrelling or scheming. She sits in the heat, half-asleep, and the poem's central idea is that a world of tiny magic can be enchanting and faintly uneasy at once, a lazy noon with a darkness gathering at its edges.
The first stanza dresses her in royal regalia shrunk to fit. Her throne is "green with fine moss", and in place of a gold crown she wears a garland of "webs". The choice is lovely and slightly sinister, since a web is delicate and beautiful yet built to trap. The orb that traditionally signals a monarch's power becomes "a harebell globe of frozen dew", which she can "hardly" support in her "thin white hands". That "hardly" works twice. The dewdrop is heavy because she is so small, but she also seems drained, almost too tired to hold up her own authority. "Frozen" is strange as well. At noonday heat, dew should have vanished long ago, so the word suggests a moment held still by enchantment.
In the second stanza the perspective loosens into dream. "Leaves tumbling over / Wink in the purple sky" gives us a sky that is not the one we know, as if we were seeing through fairy eyes or through a heat haze. The leaves "wink" like conspirators. Then the wind arrives, personified as an idle youth. It is "too tired" to blow, it "sidles by", and with "hands in pockets at the hawthorn gate" it "Whistles a lullaby." The slouching, pocketed hands are cheerfully modern and almost comic beside thrones and garlands. Hawthorn is often linked with fairies in British folklore, so the gate may mark the edge of her realm, though that is my inference rather than something the poem says. The lullaby tells us what the stanza is doing, which is lulling both Titania and the reader.
The sound of the poem follows the same drift. The opening stanza has no rhyme at all, and its uneven lines wander like thoughts in the heat. Then rhyme settles in with "sky", "by" and "lullaby", the same sound three times in six lines, rocking like a cradle song. In the last stanza "gone" and "Oberon" chime softly, and the sleepy music closes just as the mood turns.
That turn comes in the final four lines. "A smile goes drifting through her eyes, / Ruffles darkly and is gone": the smile is treated like weather, a breeze crossing water, and "darkly" tips it from pleasure toward something colder. We are never told what she is smiling at. Then "The shadow sweeps across the green / Of hunchback Oberon." The grammar links her smile to the shadow, so it seems her passing expression darkens the king. "Green" might be his clothing or the grass he stands on, and the poem doesn't decide. "Hunchback" is a deliberately unflattering word for a king. Beside her "thin white hands", he is bent and diminished, and the poem hints at private mockery or contempt without explaining it. Ending on his name leaves the question hanging.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It takes a famous figure and refuses her grandeur, offering scale, texture and mood instead. We feel the heat and drowsiness first, so the chill of the last stanza arrives almost unnoticed. Because the poem suggests rather than tells, the reader has to finish the story: why she smiles, and what that smile does to the hunched king at the end.