Most poems about grief look at the person who suffers. Swinburne's eleven lines look at Sorrow herself. She is a winged wanderer, "on wing through the world for ever," who now and then tries to "borrow / Rest," in case rest might "haply deliver" her. The poem begins with sympathy for a restless, homeless figure, but its last stanza turns that sympathy into something harsher. Everything in the world passes except Sorrow, and so there is no real rest for her or for anyone she visits.
The verb "borrow" is well chosen. A borrower expects to give things back, and the word suggests that even Sorrow's pauses are temporary and on loan. The line "Rest, if rest might haply deliver" is tentative, and "haply" (perhaps) shrinks the hope to a bare possibility. Then comes the cut-off line "Sorrow." It sounds like a door shutting on that hope.
The middle stanza gives the poem its strongest pictures. The one thought lodged in Sorrow's heart is "gnawn thorough / With pain," and the poet compares it to "a weed in a dried-up river, / A rust-red share in an empty furrow." Both images show something left behind by what should have given it purpose. A river exists to carry water, and a ploughshare exists to cut a furrow that will be sown. Here the water is gone and the field is empty. The weed survives where nothing else can, and the rusting blade has nothing left to cut. The heart in the poem is like that, still existing but starved of what makes it useful or alive. The syntax is also slightly ambiguous. The "thought" and the "heart" both seem to be the weed and the share, as though pain has made them indistinguishable. The poem never says what the thought is, though the final stanza suggests it is the knowledge that Sorrow will not end.
That last stanza turns from picture to argument. "Hearts that strain at her chain would sever / The link where yesterday frets to-morrow." Sorrow is now a chain, and the weak link is the present moment, where the past wears away at the future. People want to cut that link and stop the past from spoiling what comes next, but they cannot. "All things pass in the world, but never / Sorrow." The sentence appeals to an old consolation, that nothing lasts, and then denies it. The break after "never" matters too. The line hangs on that word for a moment before "Sorrow" lands, as heavily as a final verdict.
Swinburne's sound is as much of an argument as his imagery. The poem follows the pattern of a roundel: eleven lines, only two rhyme sounds, and a short refrain taken from the opening word. So the poem begins and ends on "Sorrow," and the form closes around its subject like a cage. The two rhyme sounds support the meaning. One is the *-orrow* of "borrow," "furrow," "to-morrow" and "Sorrow" itself, with "thorough" a near-echo. The other is the *-ever* of "ever," "deliver," "river," "sever" and "never." Time, hope and escape all keep returning to the same few sounds, and the reader has no way out of the pattern.
The rhythm reinforces this. The opening lines have a rolling, lilting beat that sounds like wings in motion ("SORrow, on WING through the WORLD for EVer"). The middle stanza slows into clustered stresses such as "rust-red share" and "dried-up river," where the words themselves seem clogged and heavy. Small sound-links, like "strain" and "chain," tie the grip of the chain to the effort of pulling against it.
The poem is significant for how much it packs into so little space. It is only a handful of short lines, yet it contains a personification, two precise images of barrenness, and a reversal of a familiar comfort. It also shows how closely Swinburne's verse can fit sound to idea. A lyric about something that cannot be escaped is built from a form that cannot be escaped, and the poem's last word is the same as its first.