Pope's speaker opens with a groan rather than a greeting: "Again? new tumults in my breast?" Venus has returned to a man who thought he had retired from desire, and he begs her, with a comic stammer, to "let me, let me rest." The title marks the poem as a version of a Horatian ode (Book IV, Ode I), carried from ancient Rome into an English setting. Its central joke, and its central ache, is that the plea convinces no one, least of all the man making it. He orders love away, and by the final lines he is dreaming of chasing her through a moonlit park.
The argument moves in clear stages. First comes the refusal: he is "sober fifty," no longer the man he was "in the gentle reign of my Queen Anne." The phrasing is neat, since "reign" dates his youth and also casts Venus as a monarch whose rule he once served. Next he politely redirects her. She should "direct your doves" to "Number Five," which reads like a London address, and "spread round Murray all your blooming loves." Murray is praised at length as young, noble, a defender of the injured, equally good at charming a mistress or keeping a friend. Pope tucks a worldly note into the compliment: "Make but his riches equal to his wit." Wit Murray has, and the conditional suggests money is the missing ingredient for a true conqueror.
The praise grows into a tableau, with a marble Venus wearing a living face ("Chloe lend the face"), a house "embosom'd in the grove," and the Thames reflecting a "visionary scene." Grecian statuary and an English river sit side by side, and the word "social," repeated in "social life and social love," makes love a matter of company and dancing. Then the mood turns: "With me, alas! those joys are o'er." The double "Adieu!" is a farewell to "still believing, still-renew'd desire" and to "the kind deceivers of the soul." Those deceivers are presumably wine and hope, called kind because they flatter, and the phrase admits that the pleasure was always partly illusion.
The hinge comes at "But why?" The speaker, who has just said goodbye, finds an "involuntary tear" on his cheek. His fluent speech fails in her presence: "Why words so flowing, thoughts so free, / Stop, or turn nonsense, at one glance of thee?" The line stumbles in the way it describes.
The form supports this unsteadiness. The poem is written in rhymed couplets, each pairing a short eight-syllable line with a longer ten-syllable one. The short line often works like an intake of breath, and the long one like the sigh or answer. Interjections ("Ah," "alas") pile up, and repetitions such as "Turn, turn" and "let me, let me" give the voice the feel of real pleading. In the last movement, "Now, now I seize, I clasp thy charms, / And now you burst (ah, cruel!) from my arms," the grammar slides from "thy" to "you," as though the dream-figure has slipped from reverent address into something closer and more painful. The next couplet, "And swiftly shoot along the Mall, / Or softly glide by the canal," uses two short lines in a row, so the rhythm itself speeds up as she escapes. The poem ends on "Cynthia's silver ray" and "rolling waters snatch'd away," with love shown as a flicker of moon and water, glimpsed and gone.
What makes the poem significant is how it handles borrowing. Pope does not simply translate. He keeps the shape of an old complaint and fills it with his own surroundings: a named friend, a queen, a park, a river. The polish and wit of the couplets make the unguarded moment more striking, because a tear is more startling in a poem this elegant. The speaker's request for peace is never granted, and the poem is more honest for leaving it unanswered.