Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.
Lines 5-8
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 speaker starts laying out his story here. It's about a woman he loved.
- What's with the past tense of "loved" though? Does he no longer love her? Has he moved on?
- Again, it's not yet clear. All we know is that this beloved girl used to look as "Fresh as a rose in June" (6). That simile shows us how young and vital this girl was.
- It was a look that apparently attracted our speaker, because the dude went to go visit her at her cottage one night.
- And that's all the story we get in this stanza—pretty thrilling, we know. Still, the action is starting to pick up.
- Right after we note that the rhyme and rhythmic pattern in this second stanza is similar to the one we noticed in the first (check out "Form and Meter"), we'll let you hustle on over to the third stanza to find out what happens next.