Most prayers ask for something to happen. Amy Levy's speaker asks for something to be imagined, and that small, strange request is where the ache of the poem lives. Love, she says, is not hers "on this side the grave," so she begs instead to "imagine Love," to "conceive such thing," finally to "image" it. She never asks God to change her life. She asks only for permission to fill her mind with what her life withholds.
The form suits that modesty. There are five stanzas of six lines, each rhymed aabccb: a couplet, a loose line, another couplet, and a closing line that answers the loose one. The lines are short, mostly three beats and six syllables, and nearly all end in a pause, so the poem sounds hushed, like something said under the breath. The answering lines carry the weight: Love/prove, laid/afraid, men/ken, forego/woe. Each stanza ends on a small settling click, and that click works like composure. The speaker is holding herself together by rhyme.
The imagery is a sealed room. "Lonely as in a tomb," "Here in the dark I lie," "shut in alone": the speaker is buried alive. The grave that marked the limit of love in the first line has become her present address. God has kept back "the key / Which opes the way to men," a lovely compression, since the door could lead to lovers or to company in general. The word "cross" gives her suffering a religious frame, yet the verb is passive ("was laid"), and no redemption follows. The nearest she comes to protest is "My God, I know not why."
That restraint is the poem's central tension. She claims "I make not any moan," but a poem this eloquent about loss is itself a kind of moan, and the denial gives her away. "Lonely, yet not afraid" reads as a brave sentence, and also a bleak one, because fear would at least mean she still had something to lose. The old-fashioned prayer language ("Thee," "art," "opes," "ken") adds to the effect. The grand, formal register sits oddly beside the very human thing being requested, and the gap between them makes the wish feel smaller and sadder.
The verbs are worth watching too. "Prove" in the first stanza means to experience or test. By the second she is only willing to "conceive," and by the end she asks to "image." Each step is a little further from the real thing. The phrase "'claspt hands and lips that kiss'" sits in quotation marks, and judging by that, she is borrowing the language of love poetry, as though love is something she knows from other people's words. Even her dream of closeness comes secondhand.
The last line is the sharpest turn. She asks for "The bliss without the woe," and the phrase can be read two ways. It may be a real consolation: imagined love cannot hurt, and she has already said she will "still forego" the genuine article. Or it may be bitter, since love without woe is a thinner, safer thing than love itself, and she knows she is settling. The poem does not choose between the two. Her whole prayer rests on that ambiguity, a plea for comfort that also admits how little comfort it can give.
The rhymes also do something the speaker cannot do in life. "Entwine" and "mine" lock together at the line ends, though no "loving arms" ever "entwine / around mine" in the poem's world. Union exists only in sound. The poem's quiet distinction is that it makes a prayer out of exactly this substitution. It treats imagination as the last room left to the speaker, and it never pretends that room is big enough.