A friend complains that Lewis Carroll is glad to see him when he turns up but doesn't seem to miss him when he stays away. Carroll's answer is a Valentine that refuses to apologise. Its central idea is that real affection doesn't have to be paid for in misery. Pleasure can be "actual" without leaving us "shuddering and aghast," and a friend can be "firm and fast" and still "bear parting." The friend's complaint quietly assumes that love is measured in suffering. Carroll takes that assumption and inflates it until it bursts.
The method is exaggeration. The first three stanzas are rhetorical questions, each more indignant than the last: "cannot pleasures... be actual," "must I then... resign" my gladness, "think you that I should be dumb"? Carroll borrows the vocabulary of high tragedy ("anguish," "thrall," "gloom and sadness") and sets it beside the homely details of daily life. The speaker is supposed to be "full DOLORUM OMNIUM," a mock-learned Latin phrase meaning full of all sorrows, except when his friend arrives "and share[s] my dinner." Otherwise he would be "sour and glum / And daily thinner." The joke lies in the drop from grand grief to a missed meal. The fourth stanza gives the ideal mourning friend a "broken sleep" and a "moan of anguish," and by then the portrait is plainly a caricature.
The form supports the joke. Every stanza has six lines rhymed *aaabab*, with four-beat lines for the main statements and short, two-beat lines for the second and fourth rhymes. Those short lines work like punchlines or sudden deflations: "And yet bear parting?", "And daily thinner?", "Of wasting sorrow." The rhymes are comic too. "Dinner" and "thinner" are a bouncy double rhyme, and "dumb," "omnium" and "come" force a Latin word into line with plain English. The brisk, singsong rhythm contradicts the gloom the speaker claims to reject, and the verse itself seems unwilling to droop.
The fifth stanza adds a new argument. A sensible lover kept from his beloved doesn't sink "in grief and wild amaze." He writes "lays" and "posts them to her." The flat, practical verb "posts" is typical of Carroll's humour, and it turns the poem into its own evidence. The speaker has been writing verse instead of wasting away, and this Valentine is the result. The sixth stanza brings back the rhyme words of the first, "last," "past," "aghast," and so closes a circle. In stanza one, "aghast" described the aftermath of lost pleasure. Now it is the poet who is "aghast" at how fast his verse flows. Grief has been replaced by a comic astonishment at his own fluency. The poem also arrives, as the lines about "thirteen days... gone and past / Of February" tell us, on the fourteenth, Valentine's Day.
The last stanza is the sharpest. "Farewell, dear friend" sounds warm, and the grand "desert waste or crowded street" suggests an epic reunion. Then comes the bathos of "Perhaps to-morrow," which sounds more like a threat than a promise. The final line reverses the original complaint. "I trust to find YOUR heart the seat / Of wasting sorrow." The capitalised YOUR points a finger, and the friend who wanted to see grief is wished some of it himself. The tone is polite on the surface and teasing underneath. Judging by its cheek, it is the kind of mock cruelty that only works between people who are fond of each other, though the poem itself never says so.
The poem matters because it shows Carroll, now best known as the creator of Alice, using his love of logic and play in a short, personal piece. He answers an accusation by taking it literally and following it to absurd conclusions. Behind the joking lies a real point, which the poem never states outright. Warmth in company, a friend's presence enjoyed fully while it lasts, may be a truer sign of friendship than gloom in absence. Carroll also turns a conventional Valentine, usually a poem of longing, into a defence of cheerfulness.