Shelley's speaker stands at the bedside of a dying young woman and, instead of simply pitying her, ends up envying her. That reversal is what makes the poem interesting. It begins as an act of comfort and turns into a confession. The woman has lost someone she loved, and she is sustained by the belief that she will meet him again in Heaven. The speaker doesn't say he shares that belief. He calls it a "dream" twice, once as an instruction ("Dream thou'lt meet thy dear one") and once as an object of longing ("a dream so dear as thine"). The title uses a cooler word, "opinion," as if the poem were stating a position. The poem itself quietly replaces that word with something warmer and more fragile. The central idea is that a love deep enough to break a heart is worth more than health or pleasure, whatever one thinks of the afterlife it hopes for.
The first stanza is built on light. The woman's "haggard eye" is full of the "glare of sorrow," but the speaker redirects the image. Her inner radiance, he says, outshines the "ray morn's bloom revealing," a colour "which mocks concealing." Judging by the imagery, he means something in her cannot be hidden, whether grief, courage or the flush of illness. Either way, her suffering is made luminous. The second stanza turns cold: she is "broken-hearted / In a world so cold as this." The poem moves from sunrise to a chilly world and then to the hope of a place where lovers will be "Never more to part."
The form supports this tenderness. Each eight-line stanza rhymes ABAB CDCD, and the first and third lines of each quatrain end on a feminine rhyme, with an extra unstressed syllable: "sorrow/borrow," "departed/broken-hearted," "barter/martyr," "pleasure/treasure." These soft endings make the verse sound like a sigh. The rhythm is mostly falling and trochaic, with lines of about seven syllables that open on a stressed word, as in "Maiden, quench the glare of sorrow." The shorter third lines, such as "Firmness dare to borrow," arrive like a catch of breath before the longer line that completes the thought. Some rhymes are only approximate, such as "eye" with "destiny," "given" with "Heaven," and "cheek" with "break." The gentle imperfection suits a poem about something that can't be perfectly mended.
The most striking move comes in the last stanza, where the vocabulary of religion is applied to love. The speaker would "barter" his existence, a commercial word, and "smile to die a martyr / On affection's bloodless shrine." A martyr normally dies for a creed, but this one dies for feeling, and the shrine is "bloodless," which echoes the woman's "ashy cheek." Her pale, wasted body becomes a sacred object, and the speaker says he wouldn't trade "that withered hand and ashy cheek" for pleasure. The word "enshrined" returns a few lines later when he imagines his own heart holding "a treasure / Such as forces thine to break." What he envies is not her Heaven but her capacity to love someone so much that losing him is fatal.
The poem's last word is "break," not "Heaven." Heaven closes the second stanza as a consoling hope. The final stanza returns to the body and the heart, and to the cost of loving. The speaker offers no promise that her dream is true, and he doesn't mock it either. He treats it as the proper companion of an intense love, a belief that helps hold the pain.
The poem is worth reading for that balance. Shelley is a major figure among the English Romantic poets, and readers often come to him for grand, searching visions. Here the scale is small and human. A skeptical or at least uncommitted speaker looks at someone else's faith without condescension and finds something enviable in it. The poem suggests that the strength of a feeling can matter more than the accuracy of the beliefs that surround it, and that is a generous thing for a poem to say about grief.