Elegies usually follow a death. Shelley's sonnet to Wordsworth is stranger and sharper, because it mourns a poet who is still alive. The loss it laments is not a person but a quality: a voice that once served "truth and liberty" and, in Shelley's eyes, no longer does. The fourteen lines make that grief feel personal and faintly accusing at once.
The opening is courteous, even tender. Shelley calls Wordsworth "Poet of Nature" and pictures him weeping over what time removes: "Childhood and youth, friendship and love's first glow." The list moves in soft pairs, and the things it names "fled like sweet dreams". Then comes a hinge: "These common woes I feel." Shelley stands beside the older poet as a fellow mourner, only to add a loss "Which thou too feel'st, yet I alone deplore." The line is knotty, but the most natural reading is that Wordsworth knows of this loss while only Shelley openly grieves it. By the end we understand that the loss is Wordsworth himself, or the Wordsworth Shelley once relied on.
The central images are built from storm and stone. Wordsworth was "a lone star" shining on "some frail bark in winter's midnight roar", then a "rock-built refuge" standing "Above the blind and battling multitude." Both are fixed points in a chaotic sea, and that is the point. A star that wanders is useless to a sailor, so the tenderness of the praise carries the seed of the complaint. The word "Above" is double-edged too. It suggests protection, but also distance from the crowd below. Then there is the phrase "honoured poverty", which makes integrity a kind of wealth, and the verbs "weave" and "consecrate", which give his songs both craftsmanship and sacred purpose. Poetry here is a vow.
The vow is broken in line 13 with a single word, "Deserting", which carries the language of a soldier leaving his post. The poem never says what Wordsworth did, and the text alone supports no more than a sense that he has abandoned the ideals the previous lines praise. What the poem makes clear is the feeling of betrayal. Praise has been piling up like a monument, and in the final lines the monument turns out to be an epitaph.
The craftsmanship supports this turn. The poem is a sonnet in steady iambic pentameter, and the evenness of the rhythm keeps the grief controlled, almost formal. The rhyme scheme is unusual, running abab cdcd ee fgfg. A couplet, "stood" and "multitude", arrives in the middle, around the point where many sonnets pivot. The poem then continues for four more lines instead of closing with a neat final couplet. It feels unfinished in the way grief does. To a modern ear "return" and "mourn" make a slightly loose rhyme, which gives the opening a faint ache of its own.
The sharpest detail is a quiet echo between the two ends of the poem. In line 4, lost youth and love leave Wordsworth "to mourn". In line 13, Wordsworth is the one who leaves: "thou leavest me to grieve." The roles have reversed. The mourner has become the cause of mourning, and Shelley is left with Wordsworth's own subject, the sorrow of things that depart. The last line makes the paradox plain, since the man "having been" what he was now seems to "cease to be", even though he is living. The poem ends on the bare verb "be", and it has nothing left to add.
This is what makes the sonnet worth reading. It is reproach disguised as tribute, and it turns Wordsworth's own themes of memory, loss and the fading of early ideals against him. It also shows how admiration can be the strictest form of criticism. Shelley does not shout or name names. He lets the praise run so high that its withdrawal is devastating, and he does it in a space small enough to hold in one breath.