Poe's poem opens as if it were going to be a funeral hymn: "How shall the burial rite be read? / The solemn song be sung?" By the end, the speaker has refused to sing a requiem at all. What he offers instead is a pæan, a song of praise and triumph, and the title announces this reversal before we read a line. The poem is about a clash between two ways of facing death: the mourners' ritual sorrow and the speaker's defiant celebration.
The speaker's contempt for the mourners comes through in small, pointed details. Their grief is tied to display: a "gaudy bier," a "costly broider'd pall." The third stanza turns this into open accusation. "They loved her for her wealth— / And they hated her for her pride," and now, with a sneer carried by the italicised word, "they _love_ her—that she died." Grief here is hypocrisy, since death has made the girl safe to admire. Even their tears are called a dishonour to "dead beauty." When they tell the speaker his voice is "growing weak" and should be "Tun'd to such solemn song," he hears only an attempt to police his feelings.
His answer is stranger than simple defiance. "I am drunk with love / Of the dead, who is my bride." The word "drunk" suggests an excess that sits uneasily beside the solemn mood he rejects, and calling a corpse a bride makes the line both tender and disturbing. The next stanza gives the poem's most striking image: the dead girl lies "All perfum'd there, / With the death upon her eyes, / And the life upon her hair." Death and life are set side by side, as if the body can't decide which it belongs to. Then the speaker picks up the role of musician: "on the coffin loud and long / I strike," and the echo through "the gray chambers" becomes his accompaniment. The coffin is his drum, and a quiet funeral becomes a noisy, almost ritual protest.
Halfway through, the poem shifts from "she" to "thou." Once the speaker addresses the dead girl directly, his argument begins to take shape. "Thou diedst in thy life's June" compares her youth to early summer, while the next lines give a run of negatives: she did not die "too fair," "too soon," or "with too calm an air." These denials sound like someone persuading himself, and perhaps the reader too. The last two stanzas supply the reasoning. She is "riven" from "more than friends on earth," meaning her life and love have been torn away, but she goes "To join the untainted mirth / Of more than thrones in heaven." Earth's affection has been shown to be compromised by money and envy, whereas heaven's mirth is "untainted." The final "Therefore" closes the argument: no requiem, but a pæan "of old days."
The form supports this tension. The poem is built from twelve-line-free quatrains, eleven in all, in a ballad-like pattern of alternating longer and shorter lines, with rhymes mostly falling on the second and fourth lines (read/dead, sung/young). The rhythm is lilting, almost like a song, which fits a speaker who insists on singing. But the music is not perfectly smooth. Some rhymes are loose ("her" and "dishonor"), and lines stretch or shrink in length. Dashes and exclamations break in, as in "oh! to dishonor / Dead beauty with a tear!" The effect is of feeling that keeps spilling past the neat frame. The repeated "so mournfully—so mournfully" imitates exactly the dreary, droning tone that the speaker wants to avoid.
The poem is also interesting because it contains a doubt. The speaker mocks the mourners for performing grief, but his own passion for a dead woman is extreme, and his loud celebration may be grief in disguise. Poe later reworked this poem into "Lenore," so it is worth reading as an early stage of a subject he kept returning to: the death of a beautiful young woman. Here, the unusual twist is that the speaker's grief turns into an attack on how everyone else grieves.