Poe starts in a dream garden and ends with a question about money, and the distance between the two is the whole poem. In twelve short lines a speaker studies a woman he never names. The title, "To----", leaves her as a blank, so she could be anyone. His eye travels from her lips to her eyes and finally to her heart, as if he were looking for the one part of her he can trust.
The opening is the most sensuous stanza. The speaker dreams of "bowers" full of "the wantonest singing birds," and then the metaphor turns: the bowers "Are lips." The garden is not a picture of her, it is made out of her. "Wantonest" is a striking choice. It suggests birdsong that is unrestrained, even a little improper. "Lip-begotten words" is stranger still. "Begotten" belongs to birth and fatherhood, so her speech is something her lips produce. Notice what is missing. The melody comes from the lips, not from the heart, and the lovely sound may be only surface.
In the second stanza the language of worship collides with the language of burial. Her eyes are "in Heaven of heart enshrined," which makes them holy, kept in a shrine. Yet they "desolately fall" on his "funereal mind," and the simile is bleak: "Like starlight on a pall." A pall is the cloth laid over a coffin, and starlight is faint, cold and far away. Her gaze reaches him but does not warm him, and the stanza itself sinks as the light does. The rhyme "fall" and "pall" lands with a thud. The sudden "O God!" shows how much the image costs him.
Then comes the turn: "Thy heart--_thy_ heart!" The dashes, the repetition and the italics make the line stumble, as if he has finally reached what matters and can barely say it. What follows is a loop of insomnia: "I wake and sigh, / And sleep to dream till day." He dreams of "the truth that gold can never buy" and, in the last line, "the baubles that it may." The long line about truth is followed by a short, almost shrugging one about trinkets. The poem never says whether he is dreaming of her heart's honesty or fearing that she, like a bauble, could be bought. Judging by the placement of "gold" at the end, the doubt seems to be part of his torment, and the poem leaves it open.
The form supports this. The three quatrains rhyme ABAB (see/melody, birds/words, enshrined/mind, fall/pall, sigh/buy, day/may). The lines alternate between a longer, roughly four-beat line and a shorter, roughly three-beat one, which gives a song-like sway that suits the birds and melody of the first stanza. The sway is not steady, though. In the last stanza the exclamations and dashes interrupt it, so the music breaks down just as the feeling gets serious. The short lines carry the rhymes that matter most: "words," "pall," "may." The final rhyme, "day" with "may," is the lightest and thinnest of the three, which suits a poem that ends on trifles.
The poem is worth reading because it packs a whole emotional argument into very little space. It moves from sound (the melody of words) to sight (the eyes) to the inner truth of the heart, and each step is less certain than the one before. It also joins beauty to mourning, with starlight lying on a funeral cloth, and readers who know more of Poe's work will recognise that pairing. Most of all, it makes an old suspicion feel immediate: a beautiful voice and a loving look prove nothing, and the only thing worth wanting is the one thing he cannot see.