Lying on your back in a forest invites idle thoughts, and Amy Levy's speaker drifts into a dark one almost by accident. Gazing up through "dusky, clustered tree-tops" at "rent, gay rifts of blue," the speaker shuts both eyes and imagines being dead and buried, the pines turned into "churchyard ground." What follows looks like a familiar final audit of a life: wrongs done, knowledge wasted, laziness, sin. But the poem swerves in its last stanza, and the swerve is the point. The deepest grief is not for what was done badly but for happiness that never arrived.
The form is deliberately plain. There are five quatrains of short lines, each with about three beats, and a rhyme that only sounds on the second and fourth lines: through/blue, around/ground, strife/life, ease/these, sad/had. The unrhymed first and third lines leave each stanza slightly open, and the rhyme closes it like a lid. This ballad-like simplicity suits a speaker who is being honest rather than clever. Even the word "fancy" is modest. A thought that "Fluttered my sense around" sounds like a passing whim, which makes the weight of what it unlocks more startling.
The imagery sets dark against light. "Dusky" and "clustered" press the trees together, while the sky shows only in torn gaps. "Rent" suggests ripped cloth, "rifts" a crack, and "gay" is a surprisingly cheerful word to find there. Even the clipped, stress-heavy line "Gleamed rent, gay rifts of blue" seems to break into pieces. When the eyes close, the blue disappears. Judging by the ending, those fragments of sky could be read as a picture of the joy the speaker has glimpsed but never possessed, always in patches and never a whole sky. That is an inference, but the poem rewards it, and the title promises a blacker forest than the bright patches the speaker actually notices.
The imagined death speech borrows the language of the gravestone: "I am at rest for ever; / Ended the stress and strife." The inverted word order of that second line sounds carved in stone, and the comfort it offers is conventional. The speaker is not comforted, though. "Straight I fell to and sorrowed" is brisk, almost businesslike, and "the pitiful past life" is already in the past tense, as if the speaker were looking back at someone else. Then comes the stanza of self-reproach. "The sloth and the sin and the failure" piles up its "and"s like entries in a ledger, and "Right wronged" and "Wise labour spurned for ease" add the language of duty neglected. The question that follows, "Did I grow sad for these?", seems to expect a yes.
The answer comes in two lines that almost trip over themselves: "They had made me sad so often; / Not now they made me sad." The repeated "sad" and the flipped word order sound like a mind correcting itself. Guilt is familiar, worn smooth by use, and it no longer moves the speaker. What does is "sorrow / For joy it never had." That word is heavier than "sad," and the line break holds back its object for a beat before the blow lands. There is a quiet pairing, too, between "for ever," the grave's endlessness in the third stanza, and the "never" of the last line. A rest without end is set against a happiness that was always absent.
In twenty short lines, the poem takes a stock graveyard meditation and turns it against its own moral habit. Instead of regret for failing to be good, it offers grief for failing to be happy, and it does so without raising its voice. It asks, very gently, whether a life measured against duty and diligence might leave no room for joy at all. Readers can disagree about the answer, but the plainness of the language is what makes the final stanza land so hard.