Two stanzas, one parting, and a promise that grows out of weakness: Shelley's poem turns a lover's exhaustion into a boast about the speed of the heart. In the first stanza the speaker is nearly helpless. The "faint spirit" sits in the light of the beloved's looks and pants "like the hind at noon / For the brooks," a thirsty deer that recalls the animal of the Psalms. Then the beloved rides off on a "barb," a swift horse whose hoofs "outspeed the tempest's flight," and the speaker, whose "weak feet were weary soon," cannot follow. The heart goes instead. The central idea is that love is not bound by the body. In the second stanza the heart vows to cling to the beloved "in the battle, in the darkness, in the need," and to ask nothing in return, "nor claim one smile."
The title calls the poem an imitation, which suggests it is written in the manner of an Arabic original rather than as a close translation. Judging by the imagery, the noon-day thirst, fast horses and battle give it a distant, romanticised colour.
The form is simple but carefully made. Each stanza has eight lines, with ten-syllable lines alternating with short ones of about five syllables. The long lines gather momentum and the short ones drop like a breath, and they often carry the beloved: "my love," "Bore thee far from me," "Did companion thee." Both stanzas follow the same rhyme pattern, ABCBADCD. The first stanza builds one of its rhymes from a refrain, because "my love" ends both the second and fourth lines. The repetition sounds like a pulse, or like a name that cannot stop being said.
The real change comes in the closing rhymes. In the first stanza, "me" and "thee" are paired, so the two lovers sit on either side of a rhyme and the distance between them stays audible. In the second stanza "thee" rhymes with "thee," and the speaker has vanished from the sound pattern altogether. The word "love," which rhymed only with itself earlier, now rhymes with "dove." The poem has found a new partner for its key word, as if the heart had been let out.
Speed is the poem's main image. The storm appears twice. First the barb outstrips the "tempest's flight," then the heart is "fleeter far than fleetest storm or steed," a superlative that is itself surpassed. The "death they bear" echoes the earlier "Bore thee far from me," so the horse that carried the beloved away becomes just one of the things the heart overtakes. The deer, tied to its patch of dry ground, gives way to a dove. Tender thought "clothes" the heart in "the wings of care," a lovely verb that makes devotion a kind of plumage. "Care" is worth pausing on, because it means both affection and anxiety. The heart flies on the strength of worry as much as of tenderness.
The syntax of the second stanza adds to this. It is one long sentence, and its subject, "The heart," hangs in the air until "mine" arrives in line six. The sentence travels through storm, steed and death before it lands, as the heart does.
The poem also reverses the speaker's position. At the start the spirit sits passively in the glow of the beloved's looks, receiving. By the end it will not even "claim one smile for all the comfort, love, / It may bring to thee." Devotion has moved from needing to giving, and from wanting reward to wanting none.
The poem is brief, but it shows how Shelley can make an abstract feeling physical and fast with only a few images: a deer, a horse, a storm, a dove. It also shows that the weak speaker, left behind with tired feet, turns out to be the one whose loyalty cannot be outrun.