The poem is filled with simple yet evocative imagery. In the first stanza, for instance, the speaker paints a very clear picture of themselves:
Alone in the night
On a dark hill
With pines around me
Spicy and still,
There is no unnecessary information here; the scene is distilled to its most essential parts. And yet, despite the simplicity of the description, it is still surprising. The word "spicy," for instance, stands out; it's a fairly ordinary word, yet a unique way to describe the scent of pine trees. This one word gives the poem an added feeling of intimacy and relevance: the poem feels modern because the language is at once direct and whimsical.
In the second stanza, the speaker describes "a heaven full of stars" that are "White and topaz / And misty red." Once again, the imagery is clear and simple: the speaker is just describing colors. Yet the poet keeps things interesting by being inventive in the way colors are described. So rather than "white, blue, and red," the poem uses the word "topaz," which is suggestive of the glittering surface of a precious stone, and "misty" red, which adds a layer of specificity.
The speaker describes the stars again in stanza 4, saying:
Up the dome of heaven
Like a great hill,
I watch them marching
Stately and still,
The imagery in this stanza mirrors the imagery in the first stanza; where the speaker was the one situated on a "dark hill" at the beginning of the poem, they are now imagining that the sky is a "great hill" on which the stars are "marching." The syntax (or word order) in the last two lines of the stanza also obscures what or who "Stately and still" is describing: the stars or the speaker. This allows the phrase to be applicable to both subjects, so that it once again seems as if the speaker is mirroring the heavens, instilled with the dignity and calmness of distant stars.
At first glance, the words "marching" and "still" also seem to contradict each other—are the stars marching across the sky, or are they staying in place? The word "still," though, may, in this case, be understood to refer to more of an emotional stillness or tranquility.