Rolfe Humphries has chosen a quiet scene and made it quietly strange. The poem describes what looks like a medieval or late-medieval image, the kind of courtly picture one might find in a tapestry: a lady with a falcon, a faithful hound, a gallant approaching in a crimson cloak. The title and the arrangement of figures suggest an artwork the speaker is looking at, though the poem never names one, and it is wiser to say the poem behaves like a description of a picture than to guess at a source. The scene turns on a single gesture: the gentleman offers the lady his heart, and she does not raise her eyes.
What makes the opening stanza so effective is its repetition of one small word. The leaves are "almost moving," "almost golden"; the light is "almost warm." Everything in this world is on the verge of life and never quite arrives. The background is described through a stack of comparisons, "blue as midnight," "more blank and dark than cloud, as black as storm," that pile up darkness as if the speaker were trying to get the shade right and kept overshooting. The result is a world that is frozen at the edge of feeling, which prepares us for the heart that follows.
The comedy comes next, and it is gentle. The dog gets a whole stanza, "good little dog," paw lifted, oblivious to "three white careless rabbits." Humphries lets the hound's single-mindedness stand for a kind of innocence: the animal is absorbed in its own small task and sees neither prey nor romance. Meanwhile the falcon, who is at least alert, turns toward the gallant, and the lady's gaze stays fixed on the dog. The chatty, slightly affectionate tone ("good little dog") makes the picture feel observed by a real person with a sense of humor, not catalogued by a scholar.
Then comes the heart itself, and the humor sharpens. The gentleman is "more elegant than smart," a mild, deflating judgment. He holds the heart "chastely, between thumb and finger / Whose U it does not fill," a wonderfully precise image of the curve of thumb and forefinger left mostly empty. The heart is "a plum in size, / A somewhat faded strawberry in color." Nothing here is grand. The organ that poetry has spent centuries inflating into a symbol of overwhelming passion is reduced to a small, slightly tired piece of fruit. "Faded" is the cruelest word in the poem, and the "somewhat" that softens it makes it funnier.
The final stanza turns from description to question: "How can a heart be beating in the bosom, / And yet held up, so tiny, in the hand?" The paradox is the poem's center. In the picture, the heart is both inside the lover and offered outside him, which is impossible, and yet the image does not seem foolish to the artist who made it. Humphries answers with two words, "Innocence; mystery," and then adds a closing jab at the modern reader: "an Age of Science / Would hardly understand." The suggestion is that a literal-minded era would see only an error of anatomy, where an older way of seeing grasped that a symbol can be true without being plausible.
Formally, the poem supports this gentle balance. The stanzas are quatrains with short final lines, and the rhyme is loose and partial, with "warm" and "storm," "bent" and "intent," "air" and "there," while some pairs ("heart" and "smart") are firm. The last line of each stanza is shortened, which gives each one a small dying fall, like a pause before the next detail. The effect is of a slow gaze moving across a surface, which suits a poem about looking.
The poem matters because it manages to be affectionate and skeptical at once. It admires the old image's innocence while smiling at its awkwardness, and it asks whether our own cleverness has cost us the ability to read such pictures at all.