Most grief poems begin with the loss. This one begins with a question, as if someone has caught the speaker crying: "And ask ye why these sad tears stream?" The answer is a dream. He has seen a dead woman again, alive and radiant, and then lost her a second time on waking. The central idea is that consolation can wound. The vision of heaven that should comfort him leaves him, in the poem's own phrase, "doubly weary."
The Latin epigraph from Ovid, "Te somnia nostra reducunt," means roughly "our dreams bring you back." It sets up the poem's whole mechanism: sleep is the only place the dead return. The word "sleeping" in the fourth line plays on this. She is "in the grave... sleeping," while he must wake, so the two states have swapped places. She rests, and he is the one left in the harsh daylight.
The middle stanzas are built from bright, almost overloaded images. She appears with "the bloom upon her cheek still glowing," a detail that denies decay, since the grave is nowhere in sight. A "golden ray" plays around her, and she sweeps a lyre wreathed in "lambent fire" and bound with roses and "amaranth." That last flower matters. Amaranth was traditionally the unfading flower, so it quietly signals that her happiness will not wither. The vocabulary of light keeps piling up: "realms of light," "everlasting radiance," "wrapt in gold." The speaker seems to be gathering every shining word he knows. It also makes the vision feel slightly unreal, more like a painting of heaven than a person he knew. The poem mixes traditions freely, too. She stands "co-equal with the seraphs," which is Christian, yet the "bliss Elysian" belongs to classical myth. Heaven is imagined from whatever poetic materials were at hand.
The form is tidy and, for the first five stanzas, almost serene. Each stanza is a quatrain in rhymed iambic tetrameter, rhyming ABAB, with a gentle lilt: "I saw her mid the realms of light." The second and fourth lines of most stanzas end on soft, falling rhymes: "weeping/sleeping," "glowing/blowing," "gleaming/beaming." Those long -ing sounds linger like a held note, which suits a poem about a dream that will not quite let go. The fifth stanza is where the music slips. "Elysian" and "vision" match only loosely, and the sentence runs "Faded in air" just as the speaker tries to reach her ("I strove to reach her, when, behold..."). The imperfect rhyme is a small crack in the pattern at the moment the dream breaks. Even the exclamation "a lovely vision!" sounds more like a sigh than a celebration.
The final stanza holds the most interesting move. All the way through, the dead woman has been "her" and "she," described from a distance. Then, in the last two lines, the speaker turns and speaks to her directly: "I could not envy thee, / Although so blest, and I so dreary." The sudden "thee" makes the ending feel intimate, as if he has stopped explaining himself to the strangers of the first line and is now talking only to her. The sentence is also a careful piece of emotional honesty. He says he cannot envy her, but only after admitting how dreary he is. The line hints that envy was a temptation. His generosity is real, but it costs him something.
The poem's wording is conventional: "ye," "'twas," "behold," and the stock furniture of seraphs and lyres. Judging by that, it reads like a writer working within inherited habits of elegy rather than breaking them. Its interest lies elsewhere. It sees that a happy dream of the dead is not a happy event, because the dream reverses the order of grief. The loss is felt freshly, after a moment of having her back. The poem's steady sound and its late, quiet turn toward "thee" give that experience a shape a young reader can recognise: the ache of waking from a dream you did not want to end.