The poem ‘A Fairy Song’, refers to a fairy that serves his/her fairy queen. He/She spreads the dew on the flower everywhere he/she crosses. He/She wanders many places to do this work like hills, pales and so on.
The fairy flies over hill and open river valleys, through bushes and prickly plants, above parks and fences, through floods and fire.
The fairy travels everywhere faster than the moon revolves around the earth. The fairy serves the Fairy Queen.
The fairy works for the fairy queen and must deliver dewdrops (orbs here refers to the spherical shape of the drops) on the greenery around. This includes delivering dewdrops to the cowslips – a yellow flower with tall slender stems. The cowslips are therefore indebted to the fairy queen and therefore become her pensioners.
In their yellow gold petals being referred to as coats… thus personifying it in a way, you can see spots. The spots are red in colour and therefore look like rubies. If you have seen a cowslip, you will notice it has red spots in the centre. The poet says this is possible because of the favour the fairy does to the cowslips by delivering dew to them. The red spots are compared to freckles that appear at the peak of a cowslip’s life.
The fairy finally says that he/she must look for more dewdrops that have been compared to pearls so that he/she can hang them in every cowslip’s ear. Again this is a personification where the cowslip is given a human quality of having an ear that can be fashioned with a pearl.
