This elegiac poem in blank verse is a love poem to both the medical profession and the poet's loved one who seems to be getting better. One gets the distinct impression, however, that both the poet and the patient, whose professed improvement is relayed to us though the poet, are protesting too much. Each stanza (of four) deftly intertwines the subjects of love, medical care, history and the health of living things. In this poem, which is more sophisticated than a first reading or even a second might indicate, the poet conflates the health of the human patients in University Hospital, Boston, with the leit motif of the well-being of the natural world as exemplified by trees in particular.