Few speakers say goodbye as reluctantly as the one in Anne Brontë's "Farewell". The first line announces a parting and takes it back in the same breath: "Farewell to thee! but not farewell / To all my fondest thoughts of thee." The speaker gives up the person's presence but not what that presence left behind: a face, a voice, a smile, and above all a hope. The poem's central idea is that memory and hope can outlast separation, so that a goodbye need not be a loss.
The form suits this steadiness. After an opening stanza of eight lines come five quatrains, all in regular iambic tetrameter and all rhymed ABAB. The pattern gives the poem the calm of a hymn, and the calm itself makes a point, since the speaker is grieving but never loses composure. The rhymes are mostly full ("farewell" with "dwell", "eye" with "outvie"), but a few are looser. "Me" is paired with "memory", and "breast" with "blest". Those small slips keep the polished surface from sounding too tidy.
The middle of the poem is a slow inventory of the beloved, one sense at a time. First comes "that form and face", then "that voice", then "that laughing eye", then "that smile". The repeated "that" makes each one feel pointed at from a distance, as if the speaker were holding up pictures. The language is full of light and enchantment. The eye has a "sunny beam", the smile a "joyous gleam", the voice a "magic" that leaves the speaker's spirit "tranced". An early line adds a twist: the speaker says that without this meeting they could never have imagined that a living face might "so far outvie" even "fancied charms". Reality has beaten imagination, which is why the memory is worth guarding. The inventory ends with the smile, which "mortal language" cannot express. That last word is quietly important, because it prepares the poem's turn toward something beyond the mortal.
That turn begins at "Adieu", the second goodbye, which is as unconvincing as the first. The speaker clings to "the hope with which I cannot part", an odd phrase in a poem about parting. Here the other person briefly acts: "Contempt may wound, and coldness chill." Judging by this line, the love may not be returned, or at least not warmly. The poem never explains, which makes the admission more striking. It is the only moment of hurt, and it is dismissed with a "But still". The word "still" runs through the poem ("still shall dwell", "still would I fain", "cherish, still", "still it lingers"), and it keeps its double meaning of "yet" and "unmoving". The speaker's feeling does not move, however things change around it.
The last stanza hands the problem to Heaven, and it does so with a surprisingly practical image. The speaker hopes the future will "pay the past / With joy for anguish, smiles for tears." Pain becomes a debt that time must settle, and the neat exchange of "smiles for tears" is balanced almost like a ledger. It also brings back the smile that earlier defeated all language. What could not be described is now what the speaker most hopes to be paid.
The poem is significant for how much feeling it gets from restraint. There is no storm or accusation, only a quiet refusal to let go, expressed in plain words and even rhymes. The poem is also honest about its own limits. It admits that the beloved is perhaps unreachable and that words fall short of a smile, and yet it ends looking forward. For a reader at school, the lesson may be how a conventional love lyric can hold a stubborn emotional idea: saying goodbye and holding on can happen in the same line.