Few poets pick a fight with an entire branch of human knowledge in the first line, but Poe does. His sonnet opens by calling out its target, "SCIENCE!", and then spends fourteen lines accusing it of one crime: stealing the magic from the world. The speaker is not neutral. He is a poet who feels personally robbed, and the poem's central idea is that cold fact and imaginative wonder cannot share the same sky.
The accusation begins with a paradox. Science is "true daughter of Old Time", so she ought to be venerable, yet she "alterest all things with thy peering eyes." The word "peering" makes her a prying, squinting intruder, a figure who stares at things until they stop being mysterious. By the fourth line she has become a vulture whose "wings are dull realities". Poe sets this against the poet's own "undaunted wing", so the poem becomes a contest between two kinds of flight. The poet soars through "jewelled skies" in search of "treasure," while Science feeds on him from above. Notice that the vulture is a frightening image, too. The poem never pretends Science is weak.
The form carries the argument. It is a sonnet, with fourteen lines of mostly steady iambic pentameter, and that formal, courtly beat gives the anger a dignified, almost old-fashioned tone. The rhymes pull the key ideas together. In the first eight lines the same sound returns four times: "eyes," "realities," "wise," "skies." Science's gaze, her facts, her claim to wisdom and the heavens she has invaded all chime with one another, so the poet cannot escape her even in the sound of the verse. The language is archaic too ("thou," "preyest," "hast thou not"), as though the speaker were addressing an enemy in a court of law. The poem is built from rhetorical questions, each of which is really an accusation with the answer already assumed.
The final six lines show the poem's best craft. Poe lists the casualties of Science, and the list moves steadily downward. First Diana, the moon goddess, is "dragged" from her chariot (the "car"), so the moon itself has lost its divinity. Next the Hamadryad, a tree spirit, is "driven" from the wood. Then the Naiad, a water spirit, is "torn" from her flood, and the Elfin is taken from the grass. The verbs "dragged," "driven" and "torn" grow more violent, while the setting falls from the heavens to the forest, then the stream, then the lawn. It ends with the speaker himself, and the sudden arrival of "me" in the last couplet is the most striking moment in the poem. Until then the victim was "the poet," a general type. Now the loss is private: "from me / The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree." After all those grand mythological names, the final image is small and sensory. The tamarind tree sounds warm and faraway, and a summer daydream is just the kind of fragile thing that scrutiny can break.
The poem also holds a quiet irony. The nymphs are not destroyed, only exiled to "some happier star", which suggests that the more Science looks outward, the further the old spirits retreat. And the poem itself is crowded with the classical and fairy figures it claims have vanished. Poe mourns them by summoning them, which means the sonnet works as a small refuge for the imagination it defends.
That is why the poem remains worth reading. It is not a simple attack on knowledge. It asks a question that students will recognise from their own lives: when we learn exactly how something works, do we gain more than we lose? Poe's answer is bitter and one-sided, but he gives that feeling a shape, from the vulture to the single dream under a tree, and makes it hard to dismiss.