At a funeral for a young woman, the speaker bristles against the hypocrisy around him. Her friends only loved her for her wealth and hated her pride, but now they weep—tears he sees as an affront to her beauty. They think his voice is too weak to sing properly, or that his song should be mournful enough not to disturb the dead. But he rejects their solemn rites entirely. Instead of a requiem, he strikes the coffin itself as a drum and turns his song into a pæan, an ancient song of praise.
His grief is tangled with obsession. He calls the dead woman his bride and confesses he is “drunk with love” for her. There’s something feverish and unsettling in the way he lingers on her perfumed body, the death in her eyes and the life still gleaming in her hair. Yet the mood isn’t just morbid—it shifts toward a strange triumph. He insists she didn’t die too young or too calmly, because she’s gone to join a purer joy in heaven. The poem closes not on hopeless sorrow, but on a defiant, almost ecstatic determination to send her spirit upward with a celebration instead of a lament.