Before the poem proper begins, Amy Levy gives us a warning. The epigraph, credited to A.M.F. Robinson, says that something "was true last night, / Tho' it is false to-day." Everything that follows tries to hold on to that kind of truth, the truth of a feeling that daylight has no room for.
The poem falls into three parts, divided by asterisks, and each does a different job. In the first, a dream arrives with "a crowd of folk that stirred, / Jested, fluttered." The verbs are light and restless, almost insect-like. Against them Levy sets one still figure: "only you, / You alone of all that band, / Calm and silent, spake no word." The repeated "you" works like a spotlight. The climax is tiny: a hand that "one moment's space / Sought the fingers of my hand," then a look. Nobody speaks. "All was well between us two" is flat and almost conversational, and that plainness is what moves us. Judging by how much relief the line carries, things may not be well between them awake, though the poem never says so.
The sound of this section mirrors its meaning. The lines are short, four-beat, and they shift between the smooth iambic of "A fair dream to my chamber flew" and clipped, seven-syllable lines like "Calm and silent, spake no word," which end abruptly. The rhymes interlock in a pattern that only closes at the end. "Flew" and "you" in the opening lines are answered by "knew" and "two" in the last, so the dream's arrival and its resolution are tied together by sound. There is a quiet irony too. The one private gesture, the hand, rhymes with "band," the crowd it slips away from.
The middle section is only three lines, all on one rhyme: "past," "cast," "last." It is the poem's hinge, and it moves quickly. The speaker drifts "on from dream to dream," but the first vision throws its "Mystic radiance o'er the last," like a lamp left burning in the first room of a house. The tripled rhyme sounds almost like a charm.
Then the speaker wakes, and the poem changes pace. The night is "pale" and "expectant of the day," as though the room, like the speaker, were waiting to see what the morning would do. The rhyme settles into tidy alternation (hung / gloom / clung / perfume, then cling / encloses / string / roses), as if the poem were breathing out. The senses have also changed. The dream was made of sight, sound and touch, a crowd, a flash of eyes, a hand. Waking leaves only smell, the most faint and least provable sense. The dream "clung / To my thought like faint perfume."
The closing simile gives the poem its meaning. The perfume is compared to what stays in "the void flask, which erst encloses / Attar of rose," and in "the pale string / Of amber which has lain with roses." Both objects keep a scent after losing the substance. "Void" is the key word. It admits that the bottle is empty and the dream is gone, yet the sweetness is real and can be smelled. This is Levy's answer to the epigraph. She doesn't claim the dream was true after all, and she doesn't dismiss it as false. She finds a third position, in which the fact has vanished but its effect has not. The repeated "pale," first for the night and then for the amber, links the dawn to the keepsake, so that the waking world seems already to be turning into memory.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it claims. It never describes the disappointment of morning, and it ends on "roses" with no return to the day. That leaves the reader with the ache the speaker is avoiding, in a form small enough to hold in one hand, like the bottle itself.