Most poems about a lost friend mourn a person. Amy Levy's mourns a feeling, or rather treats a feeling as a person, which is a stranger and more unsettling thing to do. The clue arrives midway through: "Joy is my friend, not sorrow." After that, the "hands and face," the "Beloved" and the long-ago wandering "by strange seas" all belong to Joy herself, who has gone and left the speaker in company she never chose.
The poem opens with a complaint about other people. "The people take the thing of course, / They marvel not to see / This strange, unnatural divorce / Betwixt delight and me." The dismissive "the thing" and the legal weight of "divorce" matter here. It is a marriage word for a separation nobody else finds remarkable. To the crowd, a joyless person is simply normal. To the speaker, it is a violation of nature. These short lines, alternating four stresses and three, sit apart from the rest like a preface, plainer and more song-like.
Then the poem changes gear into a sonnet in steady pentameter. The octave builds a portrait of Sorrow as someone the speaker has studied for years: "I know the face of sorrow, and I know / Her voice with all its varied cadences; / Which way she turns and treads." Face, voice and walk are how you know a person you have watched closely. "Dreary largess" is neatly contradictory, since largess means generous giving, yet all Sorrow hands out is gloom. The word order in that sentence bends awkwardly, which suits the weariness. Then comes the refusal: "some be that grow / To hold her dear, but I am not of these." The speaker rejects the idea that suffering can become something to love. The rhymes reinforce this. The octave uses only two sounds, the *-ow* of "know," "bestow," "grow" and "ago," and a sound close to *-ease* in "cadences," "ease," "these" and "seas." The poem seems to circle over the same ground rather than move forward.
Joy arrives in the plainest language of the poem: "Joy is my friend, not sorrow." These are monosyllables, a flat statement of allegiance. Then the diction swings towards fairy tale: "by strange seas, / In some far land we wandered, long ago." The vagueness of "some" is telling. Joy is placed somewhere no map could show, and "strange" echoes from the first stanza, tying the unreachable place to the "unnatural divorce."
The sestet breaks into apostrophe. "O faith, long tried, that knows no faltering! / O vanished treasure of her hands and face!--" The exclamations and dashes drop the composure of the octave. The rhymes loosen into alternating lines, and "faltering" is paired with "cling" in a slightly imperfect match. Whether or not that is deliberate, it is an apt moment for a rhyme to waver. In "Unmoved within my heart she holds her place," I read "unmoved" as unshaken: Joy is the one fixed point in a heart that is otherwise at Sorrow's mercy.
The couplet turns to the future. "And never shall I hail that other 'friend,' / Who yet shall dog my footsteps to the end." The quotation marks are pure sarcasm. Judging by the octave, the "friend" is Sorrow, though "to the end" might hint at something larger, perhaps death, and the poem leaves that open. The change of imagery is striking. Sorrow was almost courtly, handing out her "largess," and now she is a dog at the heel. The speaker cannot stop her following, only refuse to greet her.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it denies consolation. It does not promise that sorrow teaches or that joy will return. It offers loyalty to what is lost and a stubborn refusal to pretend otherwise. Readers today may hear in it a description of living with persistent low spirits, though that is our inference, not something the poem says. The fusion of a short, ballad-like quatrain with a strict sonnet gives it a double voice, part public complaint and part private mourning, and the sonnet's final couplet lets the private voice have the last, defiant word.