Poe opens with a bit of ventriloquism. Before the poem speaks in its own voice, it hands the floor to "Solomon Don Dunce," a name that piles wisdom (Solomon) on top of stupidity (Dunce) and lets the reader decide which wins. His verdict is that sonnets rarely contain even "half an idea," and that most are so flimsy we can see "through" them "at once / As easily as through a Naples bonnet." Then comes a twist. The speaker agrees ("Sol is right enough") and claims that *this* poem is different: "Stable, opaque, immortal." The central idea is the gap between surface and depth. Most verse, the poem says, is see-through froth, but this one keeps something back.
What it keeps back is a name. The title calls the poem an enigma, and it is an acrostic of an unusual kind. The letters run down the diagonal rather than down the margin: the first letter of line one, the second of line two, the third of line three, and so on to the fourteenth letter of line fourteen. Read that way, they spell *Sarah Anna Lewis*. You can check it yourself, from "Seldom" to the "s" in "names." The name has fourteen letters and a sonnet has fourteen lines, so the form is the hiding place. The last line even gives a hint: the names "lie concealed within't," meaning inside the lines, not along their edges.
That makes the joke on the Dunce quite neat. He reads the way critics are accused of reading, skimming along the surface and judging at a glance. The poem is built to defeat that kind of reading. Its secret can't be seen unless you slow down and count.
The sound of the poem supports the mockery. The rhythm is loosely iambic, but the lines stretch and shrink, and some are indented, so the whole thing feels deliberately unbuttoned, like a lecture that keeps getting interrupted. The rhymes are mostly comic: "sonnet" and "bonnet," and then the clumsy feminine rhymes "don it," "con it," "upon it" and "within't." That final contraction is a small grin of its own, squeezing two syllables into one to make the rhyme fit. The scheme follows neither the Petrarchan nor the Shakespearean pattern, so a poem that talks about "Petrarchan stuff" also declines to obey it. Notice, too, how often lines end on the little word "it." The poem keeps handling an object, wearing it, studying it, depending on it, until the final line reveals what the object contains.
The imagery is domestic and lightweight on purpose. A Naples bonnet is a fashionable, airy piece of headwear, and the Dunce calls it "Trash of all trash!" Bad poetry becomes "Owl-downy nonsense that the faintest puff / Twirls into trunk-paper," meaning feathery stuff that a breath can blow away and that ends up lining a luggage trunk. The next image is bubbles, "ephemeral and so transparent," and the line itself seems to blow them, with its run of *b* sounds and its drifting length. Against this fragile world Poe sets three heavy words: "Stable, opaque, immortal." They are an absurd boast for fourteen playful lines, which is part of the fun. The pompous vocabulary ("veritably," "arrant") makes the Dunce sound like a man in love with his own verdicts. The coinage "tuckermanities" is also telling. It sounds like "humanities" with a sneer folded in, and judging by the form it looks aimed at a surname, though the poem itself doesn't explain it.
Look at where the "immortality" comes from. It isn't the cleverness of the verse, but "the dear names that lie concealed within't." The adjective "dear" suggests affection. Under the mockery the poem is a compliment, and its permanence comes from the person honored, not from the poet's skill.
The poem matters as a small, witty case of form doing the work of meaning. It argues that a poem can be more than it first looks, and then proves the point by making you do the reading. A sonnet that pretends to scorn sonnets is also a puzzle, a joke, and a piece of praise, all in the same fourteen lines.