Begging someone to stop singing is an odd way to praise her, and that is the trick at the heart of this short poem. The speaker cries "Fair charmer, cease!", yet nothing in the eleven lines that follow suggests he really wants her to. Every complaint is a compliment in disguise. Her music is so lovely that it is unbearable, so powerful that it threatens the listener's life. The central idea is the old courtly paradox that beauty wounds, stretched until it becomes a game the speaker is clearly enjoying.
The subtitle, "Imitation of English Poets. Waller," tells us Pope is writing in another poet's voice. Pope was an English poet of the early eighteenth century, and Edmund Waller belonged to the century before. So the poem is partly an exercise in style, a performance of gallant compliment rather than a confession of feeling. That helps explain its tone. The speaker is less a man in real danger than a wit showing how far a compliment can be pushed.
The form suits this performance. The twelve lines are six rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter, and each couplet works like a small package of wit that clicks shut on its rhyme. Some of the rhymes carry the argument. In "contrive / alive," her charms plot a death so that heavenly music will not be "heard alive." The logic is playful and neat. Heavenly music belongs in heaven, so the listener must die before he can properly hear it. Likewise, "lays" rhymes with "plays," and the angel who plays is plainly the lady herself, though she is never named.
The imagery shifts from war to storm to myth. In the opening couplet the lover's heart is already a "conquest" of her eyes, so her voice is an unfair second attack on a man who has "resign'd" already. The next couplet turns this into weather. A ship that faces "winds and lightning both at once" has no hope, and the lady's eyes and voice are those twin storms. The verbs, "threaten'd," "fail" and "assail," are violent, but the sea is only a metaphor. The danger is delicious, and the speaker admits as much: "We were too blest." The word "too" is the clue, since this is a complaint about having too much happiness.
The final four lines bring in Orpheus, the mythical musician who could draw trees to follow his song. Pope takes the myth and tops it. Orpheus charmed trees, but she has taught a tree to charm, because a lute is made of wood. The last couplet turns on a mirror-image: "A poet made the silent wood pursue, / This vocal wood had drawn the poet too." The wood is "silent" for Orpheus and "vocal" for her, and the pursuer and pursued trade places. The great poet-musician of legend would himself have followed her lute. This is the most daring compliment in the poem, because it beats the legend, and it works because the idea is built into the instrument's material. Her skill gives the dead wood a voice.
It is worth noticing who is missing from this poem. The lady has no features, no words and no feelings. She exists only through her effects: a heart conquered, a ship wrecked, a poet drawn after her. The poem is really about the speaker's ingenuity, how many ways he can find to say "you are astonishing" without saying it plainly. The drama is in the wit, not in any relationship.
That is where its interest lies. It shows, in miniature, how the couplet could hold a whole argument in two lines, and how convention could be turned into something sharp and amusing. The poem also repays a reader who looks past the formula. The surface says "stop," while the rhymes, the escalating images and the Orpheus finale all say "go on."