Most poems about angels look upward. Leigh Hunt's fourteen lines begin that way, then do something sneakier and glance around the room. The opening wish is easy to share. How sweet it would be, the speaker imagines, if an angel stepped out of "the silent air" one evening and we could look at him without "feeble fright" or "dying of the dreadful beauteous sight." That last phrase is carefully built. "Dreadful" and "beauteous" sit side by side, terror and loveliness in one breath, as if a real angel would be more than ordinary eyes could take. Yet the visitor is oddly homely. He comes "at evening in our room," bends his "divine eyes" on ours, and brings "news of dear friends, and children who have never / Been dead indeed." The comfort lives in that last clause: the angel's news would be that the dead are not truly dead.
Then comes "Alas!", and the poem turns on its heel. We "think not what we daily see / About our hearths." The word "daily" sets itself against the rare, overwhelming vision of the first half. What we are missing is not a visitor from elsewhere but the people already in the room: "angels that are to be, / Or may be if they will, and we prepare / Their souls and ours to meet in happy air." The phrasing is careful. Angelhood here is not handed out but grown, and it takes two parties. They must be willing ("if they will"), and we must do the preparing. The souls in question are "their souls and ours," so the work is shared, and the speaker does not stand above it.
The form quietly supports this. Fourteen lines might make you expect a sonnet, but Hunt writes in rhymed couplets of mostly iambic pentameter, which gives a chiming, conversational tone. Sentences spill over the line-ends ("bend on ours / His divine eyes"; "have never / Been dead indeed"), so the rhymes never turn into a drumbeat. The rhyme of "never" and "forever" is feminine, with an extra unstressed syllable, so the line seems to drift past its expected ending, as if reluctant to stop at "forever." There is also an echo across the poem. The sound "-air" closes the second couplet ("bear" and "air") and returns in the second-to-last ("prepare" and "air"). The first air is "silent," the second "happy." The place the angel was meant to emerge from becomes the place where our souls meet theirs.
That movement from silence to music is carried through to the end. The final couplet lists "A child, a friend, a wife" in three plain nouns, with no decoration, as though to show how ordinary they are. The wife alone gets a clause, and it is the poem's most tender image: her "soft heart sings / In unison with ours, breeding its future wings." The angel of the opening said nothing, but here the heart sings. "In unison" suggests harmony rather than one person lifting another. "Breeding" is used in the older sense of nurturing or bringing forth, so the wings are something growing quietly, like a bud or a fledgling, not yet visible. Ending on "wings," rhymed with "sings," ties song and flight together. To a modern reader, calling a wife an angel might sound confining, but the stress here falls on the shared tuning of two hearts, and the whole poem insists that the preparing is done by both sides.
What makes the poem worth reading is how neatly it undoes its own opening. At first the speaker doubts that we could bear an angel's presence. By the end, the sight is bearable because it is already familiar. We cope perfectly well with the faces at our own hearths, though we rarely think of them as anything more. Hunt takes a longing for the supernatural and gives it back to everyday attention, the ordinary habit of noticing the people nearest us and helping them become more than they are. In a poem of only fourteen lines, the "Alas!" does the main work: it makes the reader look up from the page at whoever happens to be in the room.