Eighteen lines, one sentence, and a main verb that doesn't arrive until the fourteenth line: "remember." That delay is the poem's whole method. Poe addresses a woman named in the title, Marie Louise Shew, and builds a long, suspended list of people who are in her debt, so that when the plea finally comes, it carries the weight of everything stacked behind it. Its central idea is simple: the speaker is so grateful that he feels he belongs at the head of that crowd, and he asks to be remembered as "the truest, the most fervently devoted."
The structure is a rising staircase. Three separate clauses begin "Of all who," and each pushes the praise higher. First come those who "hail thy presence as the morning," then those who "weeping, bless thee / Hourly for hope," then those who "owe thee most, whose gratitude / Nearest resembles worship." The image of light and dark opens the poem. Her presence is dawn, her absence is night, and Poe makes that night violent: "the blotting utterly from out high heaven / The sacred sun." The heavy stresses on "blotting utterly" feel like a hand smearing out the sky.
The vocabulary is almost entirely religious, and it keeps intensifying. People "bless" her, a "deep buried faith" has a "resurrection," and despair has an "unhallowed bed." The boldest moment comes when those who lay down to die rise again "at thy soft-murmured words, 'Let there be light!'" These are the words God speaks in Genesis, and Poe gives them to a woman whose voice is "soft-murmured." The repeated phrase "At thy soft-murmured words" slows the line down like a hushed refrain, and the next line completes the thought: the words "were fulfilled / In thy seraphic glancing of thine eyes." In Genesis, speaking and creating are the same act, and Poe borrows that idea. Her look does what her words promise. "Seraphic" also prepares the final word of the poem, "angel's," so the climb from morning to angel feels planned.
The form supports this. The poem is unrhymed, in a loose iambic pentameter that Poe lets stretch and relax. Many lines carry an extra unstressed syllable at the end ("morning," "heaven," "worship"), which gives them a breathless, unfinished quality. His better-known poems, such as "The Raven," are famous for chiming rhyme and drumbeat rhythm. Here he drops that music, and the effect is of a voice too moved to bother with ornament. The dashes and exclamations ("ah, above all") make the speaker seem to be searching for words as he goes.
The ending is where the poem becomes most interesting. After 13 lines of "they," the speaker finally turns to himself, but not as "I." He becomes a third person: "these weak lines are written by him— / By him who, as he pens them, thrills to think." This looks like humility, since he calls his own verse "weak" and steps back from his own name. But it is also a clever kind of self-promotion. After a long catalogue of the rescued, he is the one singled out, the most devoted of all. The self-effacement and the claim to first place are held in the same breath. The final line, "His spirit is communing with an angel's," lifts him up too, since his own spirit is allowed to speak with hers. The poem humbles him and elevates him at once.
What makes it worth reading is the contrast with Poe's reputation. Many readers know him for dread, decay and madness. Here the register is open, warm and devotional, and the drama comes from grammar alone, from a sentence that holds its breath for fourteen lines before releasing a single plea. It shows that a poem of thanks can still be tense, and that gratitude can be a kind of longing: the wish not only to thank someone, but to be kept in her mind.