This seven stanza poem is written in the form of a simple ballad. The poem describes the poet's trip to his beloved Lucy's cottage, and his thoughts on the way. Each of its seven stanzas is four lines long and has a rhyming scheme of a-b-a-b. Written in iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, the poem has a lulling soothness.

Stanza 1

Strange fits of passion have I known:
And I will dare to tell,
But in the Lover’s ear alone,
What once to me befell.

In the very opening line, the poet reveals that he has experienced " strange fits of passion"  which he dares to tell in the lover's ear alone. It is not clear whether he refers to his own beloved or the reader who has the lover's ear/heart. In the context of the poem, this hardly creates any problem. For Wordsworth, the iconic romantic poet, believed that nature has the power to prepare the mind to imagine the ideal and the beautiful, which is nothing but nature herself. Poetic language is the imagined reality inspired and empowered by nature, and Lucy is embodiment of nature herself. If Lucy is his beloved, she is created in the poetic language shared between the poet and the reader.

Stanza 2

When she I loved looked every day
Fresh as a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath an evening-moon.

The simile, “fresh as a rose in June”, not only hints at the beaming youth of Lucy, it also introduces temporality in the existence of Lucy herself. Wordsworth spent a lifetime to show that the commonplace vocabulary of ordinary life has a magical charm provided it is infused with genuine poetic imagination. When a poet willingly chooses a set of language that is best suited for nursery rhymes, he runs the risk of compromising ingenuity, without which poetry is nothing. The rose is too clichéd a symbol for the beloved or love per se, so to speak.