A violet that has lost its scent and colour is a small thing to write a poem about, yet Shelley uses it to measure a much larger loss. The speaker holds a withered flower that once carried the memory of a lover's kisses, and everything in the poem grows out of the gap between what the flower was and what it is now. The central idea is painful and slightly strange. Looking at the dead flower, the speaker begins to wish he could be as still and silent as it is.
The first stanza shows that the violet was never valued for itself. Its odour was "like thy kisses breathed on me", and its colour "glowed of thee and only thee!" The flower stood in for the beloved, a way of keeping her present, so its fading is a second loss. The first two lines are built like a column of subtractions: "The odour from the flower is gone", "The colour from the flower is flown". The same pattern of noun, "from the flower" and departure verb repeats, and "flown" suggests something that has taken wing, as though the beloved herself were leaving. To modern ears "gone" and "flown" make only a near rhyme, which leaves the stanza slightly unresolved.
The poem is three quatrains rhymed ABAB, in lines of mostly eight syllables with a steady iambic beat, the rhythm of a plain speaking voice. The first stanza keeps that fullness in every line, and its exclamation mark is the only moment of open, raised feeling in the poem. After that, the last line of each remaining stanza shrinks to six syllables: "With cold and silent rest." "Is such as mine should be." The line stops short, as if the speaker's breath has run out, and the form acts out the deflation the words describe.
In the second stanza the flower turns into a body. "A shrivelled, lifeless, vacant form" piles up three adjectives, and "vacant" is the cruellest, since it suggests an emptied room. The flower lies "on my abandoned breast", and the word "abandoned" shifts our attention from the flower to the man, who is the one left empty. Then comes the stanza's sharpest idea: the flower "mocks the heart which yet is warm". Of course a dead flower cannot mock anyone, so the mockery is the speaker's own projection. The word "yet" matters too. His warmth means he is still alive and still feeling, and the poem treats that as a burden. The flower's "cold and silent rest" begins to look like a kind of peace.
The third stanza makes two attempts at a cure, in two balanced clauses: "I weep,--my tears revive it not! / I sigh,--it breathes no more on me". Tears are what you might give a wilting plant, and a sigh answers the breath the flower once seemed to give him, so these are the natural remedies. The dashes make him sound like someone testing one thing after another, and both fail. Grief, the poem says, has no power over what is finished.
The final two lines then turn the earlier mockery into an example. The flower's lot is "mute and uncomplaining", and the speaker's lot "should be" the same. The phrase is ambiguous. It may mean he ought to bear his sorrow quietly, or that his fate ought to match the flower's, which is a far darker wish. There is a quiet irony as well, because a poem of complaint is exactly what a person who was truly uncomplaining would not write. He measures himself against the flower and falls short.
Shelley is often remembered for sweeping, visionary poems, so it is striking to see him work this small. The poem's strength is its restraint. We are never told who the woman is, or whether she has died or simply left. Only "gone", "flown" and "abandoned" are given, and that openness lets the poem speak for almost any lost love. It also shows a Romantic habit of reading human feeling into a natural object, but here nature offers no comfort. The flower only reflects the speaker's loss back at him, and that is why the ending is so bleak.