Laura is dying, and the man who tells us so cannot decide whether he is mourning her or accusing her. That uncertainty is the most interesting thing about Shelley's "Song," a short lyric that dresses a lover's complaint in the full costume of a midnight tempest.
The opening stanza is pure stage-setting. "Fierce roars the midnight storm / O'er the wild mountain": the verbs come first, so the weather seems to arrive before we can brace for it. The clouds "deform" the night, a word that suggests something ugly done to a natural order. The imagery is stock Gothic: rocky heights, flying mists, a "pale" moon. Then the speaker says "See!" twice, like a guide pointing at a tableau. We are made to watch Laura die by moonlight, and the verb "flying" does quiet work. In stanza two the mists are "flying," and in stanza four "life is flying," so the landscape and the body seem to rush away together.
The third stanza turns inward, and the real subject appears with the adjective "false." Laura's pillow is "false," and by the final line she is "the false hearted." She has betrayed him, and the poem's pity is soured by that. "Shame and remorse shall howl / By her false pillow" turns feelings into animals or winds, and the next lines claim they will be "Fiercer than storms." The echo of the poem's first word is deliberate. The storm we were invited to find terrifying is outdone by a guilty conscience. Notice also the future tense: "shall howl." The speaker is not observing Laura's remorse but predicting it, and one can hear some relish under the sympathy of "Poor Laura."
Stanza four is the loneliest. "No hand her eyes to close" gives the image of someone dying with no one at the bedside. Yet "she will find repose, / For Laura's dying!" Here "for" means "because," and death is offered as the only rest she can expect. The line also repeats the earlier "Poor Laura's dying!" almost exactly, reusing the rhyme words *flying* and *dying*, so the poem tolls like a bell.
The last two stanzas switch to "I" and to a drumbeat of "Then." "Then will I seek my love, / Then will I cheer her, / Then my esteem will prove." The speaker promises kindness "when no friend is near her," but he has just told us no hand will close her eyes, so judging by the text he arrives only after she has died. "Esteem" is a cool word for a lover, and "prove" makes his love sound like evidence presented to a court. When he vows to lie and die on her grave "for the false hearted," the preposition is ambiguous. He may die on her behalf, in a devotion that outlasts betrayal, or because of her, in a gesture meant to make her guilt permanent. The poem never chooses.
The form pulls against this complexity. There are six quatrains rhymed ABAB, with short lines of five or six syllables. The odd lines end on a single stressed syllable (*storm*, *light*, *howl*), while the even lines all take soft, double endings: *mountain/fountain*, *pillow/billow*, *cheer her/near her*, *parted/hearted*. That falling cadence gives the poem a singsong, almost lullaby-like sweetness, which suits the title but sits oddly beside death and revenge. The rhymes can feel easy (*flying/dying*), and *love/prove* is an eye-rhyme, matching on the page more than in the mouth. Reading it aloud, you may find the tune slightly too pretty for the feeling, and that mismatch is part of the poem's character.
This is not a poem likely to be placed among Shelley's best-known work, and its stock storms and deathbeds follow the conventions of sentimental song. Its value for a student lies in how much it packs into so little space. With only a few well-worn ingredients, it creates a speaker whose grief, pride and resentment cannot be separated, and it ends with a vow that could be read as either love or punishment.