Poe's speaker opens with an admission of defeat disguised as an anecdote about pride. Not long ago, he says, he insisted on "the power of words" and denied that any thought could rise in the brain that the tongue could not utter. Now, as if in mockery of that boast, two soft, foreign words have stirred visions he cannot put into language. Judging by the title, these are the given names of the woman addressed, Marie Louise. The poem's central idea is that love, or reverence, can overshoot speech entirely. It is a recantation, and the speaker is the first to laugh at himself.
The self-mockery is built into the language. "In the mad pride of intellectuality" is a long, abstract mouthful, and the word "intellectuality" pushes the line past a tidy ten syllables, as if the intellect were showing off. The speaker also hides at first behind "the writer of these lines," a detached third person, as if reporting on someone else's folly. Then comes the cry "And I! my spells are broken," and the mask drops. The exclamation lands mid-line, and the next sentence has the pen falling "powerless" from a "shivering hand."
The poem is in blank verse, unrhymed lines that loosely follow the iambic pentameter rhythm. Poe is often remembered for chiming, insistent rhyme, so its absence here matters. The effect is of someone speaking, not performing. The lines are also loose, often spilling past ten syllables with soft endings ("dissyllables," "murmured"), so the verse seems to overflow its container. Enjambment does much of the work. "Denied that ever / A thought arose" makes the reader wait for the verb. "Upon the golden / Threshold" leaves "golden" hanging at the line's edge, so we pause at the doorway just as the speaker does.
Sound carries the meaning. The words describing the beloved's name are full of soft consonants: "murmured," "moonlit," "dew," "pearl." The phrase "Unthought-like thoughts that are the souls of thought" ties itself in a paradox, language straining to describe something before language. There is a quiet irony in the borrowed phrases too. The dew "That hangs like chains of pearl on Hermon hill" and Israfel's "sweetest voice of all God's creatures" both sit in quotation marks. At the moment he claims words are inadequate, the speaker can only reach for other people's words. Israfel is also the title of another Poe poem, so the angelic singer is a figure Poe knew well, and here even he "could hope" to do no better.
The ending is the poem's best stroke. The speaker strips away his abilities one by one: "I cannot write—I cannot speak or think— / Alas, I cannot feel." Feeling is the last thing to go, and he then denies that what he experiences is feeling at all. It is a state of suspension: "standing motionless" on the threshold of the "wide-open gate of dreams," not yet through it. From there he looks down a "gorgeous vista," left, right, "and all the way along," through "empurpled vapors," and the view works like a painting in perspective. Every line of sight converges on one vanishing point, "thee only!" The whole sentence has been held in suspense across nearly a dozen lines, and the last two words, italicised, arrive like the closing of a hand.
What makes the poem significant is its paradox. It is a poem about being unable to write a poem, and it proves its point by confessing failure in good verse. The speaker loses the argument he started with, and the loss is a compliment to the woman he addresses. Poe turns the limit of language into the highest praise he can offer, and he lets the reader feel that limit as a held breath at a golden threshold.