Swinburne's elegy never names anyone, and that silence shapes the whole poem. Its details suggest two deaths, three months apart, in autumn and winter. The first is a friend who "loved the lord of music." The second is that musical master himself, "the mortal god he worshipped." Judging by the imagery, the second is a great composer whose death drew the world's attention, and the first is a devoted listener or lesser figure who slipped out of life just before him. The poem's central idea is a plea for fairness in grief. When a giant falls, the smaller loss is trampled in the noise, but the speaker will not let it go unnoticed.
The poem is built from four roundels, a form Swinburne is associated with. Each has eleven lines and only two rhyme sounds, and each is held together by a refrain that borrows the opening words of its first line. The refrain returns twice, at the fourth and eleventh lines. In the first section it is "Three months bade wane," in the second "A herald soul," in the third "One went before," and in the last "A star had set." These four short phrases work almost like a summary of the poem. The refrains shift from time passing, to a messenger, to order of departure, to a single point of light. The form also suits the subject. A refrain that keeps circling back to the same words sounds like a mind unable to move on from a loss.
The lines are mostly iambic pentameter, which Swinburne makes unusually musical. That fits an elegy about music. He leans heavily on alliteration: autumn is "wan with wrath of wind and rain," and great composers have "strength of strains that make delight of dole." That last phrase compresses the poem's belief about art, that music can turn sorrow into pleasure without cancelling it. Long, rolling sentences also run across line breaks, so the reader is carried along as if by a melody. Then the short refrain stops the motion with a thud.
The imagery moves between sound and light, and the two keep blending. The dead composer's "sovereign tune" is silenced by death, yet earlier the music had "kindled" the earth "like as heaven in June." In the second roundel the friend's soul arrives in the underworld like an announcement. The "deep dense dust on death's dim threshold" trembles, and the shades of earlier musicians "rose up to greet the shade." There is something stirring in the idea that the dead have their own audience, and that the friend serves as an advance notice of the master to come. The word "herald" makes the friend important in his own right, while still placing him in the master's shadow.
The last roundel gives the poem its best image. A star sets an hour before the sun, and then the sun's own sinking fills heaven with a "deep dirge." The sun is still audible after it has gone, since its "heart's pulse yet / Thrills audibly," which suggests that great music outlasts its maker. Against that roar, the speaker asks a quietly bitter question: "how should one / Soft star be missed in all the concourse met?" The question is answered by the very next stanza, where the speaker turns to address the dead friend directly: "O sweet single heart whose work is done, / Whose songs are silent, how should I forget." The word "single" is easy to miss, but it matters. It sets one person against a crowd, and it carries the poem's quiet protest.
The poem is significant because it avoids the easy move. A more predictable elegy would spend all its energy praising the famous dead. Swinburne gives the great figure his due, with sunset, dirge and divinity, but he saves the final emotional weight for the person nobody noticed. The refrain's last repetition, "A star had set," then reads as a correction, like a hand raised in a crowded room. The poem's formal skill and its moral point come together here. Strict repetition makes the tiny loss impossible to skip, and the poem's music, which is its own kind of tribute, is partly spent on someone the world had already stopped counting.