Nobody in these twelve lines is named, and nothing is explained. We never learn who "they" are, who the beloved is, or why the speaker is kept away. Anne Brontë gives only the shape of a loss and one person's answer to it. That bareness is the poem's strength. With the circumstances left blank, the feeling comes forward, and anyone who has been separated from someone they care about can fill the gap.
The first stanza is a catalogue of confiscations, built to feel relentless. "They will not let me hear that voice," the speaker says, and two lines later, "They will not let me see that face." The repeated "They will not let me" works like a door closing again and again. The verbs behind it ("robbed," "taken," and later "seize") all belong to the vocabulary of theft. Hope, a voice, a face, a smile: the poem treats feelings and senses as property that can be carried off. This sets up the ending, because if everything is a possession, the real question becomes what cannot be stolen.
The language is plain, and almost every word is a single syllable. The few longer words are the ones that carry the most value: "spirit," "delights," "treasure." The repetition of "delights" and "delight," first with hearing and then with seeing, turns the word for pleasure into a refrain for what is forbidden. The speaker's "soul" delights to hear, so the voice reaches an inner life as well as an ear.
A small grammatical shift deserves notice. At first the beloved is "that voice" and "that face," pointed at from a distance, as though out of reach. Then, in the seventh line, the speaker says "thy smiles" and "thy love." The poem stops describing the person and starts speaking to them. After that it reads as a private address, and the "thee" of the final stanza feels earned.
The form is that of a ballad or hymn: lines of eight and six syllables alternate in a steady, singing rhythm, and the second and fourth lines of each quatrain rhyme. In the first stanza those rhymes are "dear/hear" and "see/me," so the rhyme words are the speaker's own senses and self. The lines naming what has been lost ("hope," "voice," "face," "smiles") have no rhyme partners, and it is tempting to hear them as left hanging. The closing rhyme is the most telling: "mine" and "thine." Two hearts are joined by a rhyme, in the one place where "they" have no power to separate them. The "thee" in the third line of that last stanza also quietly echoes the earlier "see" and "me."
The proportions matter too. Loss takes eight lines and the reply only four, yet the shorter stanza has the last word. It opens with a shrug, "Well, let them seize on all they can," a colloquial, almost offhand defiance. Then comes the colon and the dash, which hold back the reveal. The contrast between "all" and "One" does the rest. The consolation is also modest. Hope was robbed, and the poem never gives it back. The speaker claims constancy instead: "A heart that loves to think on thee, / And feels the worth of thine." Nobody can police memory or stop someone from valuing another person. The final word, "thine," hands the closing possessive to the beloved, so the speaker ends by crediting the other person's worth rather than dwelling on her own pain.
Anne Brontë is best known for her novels, but this short poem shows what plain speech can do. It does not shout or plead. It names the losses, shrugs at the thieves, and stays calm about what remains. The poem suggests that love's privacy is its protection, and that a feeling kept inside can survive being kept apart.