Apollo begins the poem in bed, and that is its first surprise. The sun god lies behind "star-inwoven tapestries" while the sleepless Hours fan "the busy dreams from my dim eyes." The mood is quiet and almost domestic, with attendants who wake their master and a "gray Dawn" who is their mother. Shelley gives us a god who has to be woken, and that small vulnerability matters by the end.
Once he is up, the verbs turn majestic. Apollo "climbs" the dome of heaven and "walks" over mountains and waves, and his footsteps "pave the clouds with fire." The sunrise is also an intimate scene. He leaves his "robe upon the ocean foam," and the air "leaves the green Earth to my embraces bare," as if sunlight were a lover and the atmosphere a garment slipping away. This is a god who touches the world rather than ruling it from a distance.
The poem is built from six stanzas of six lines, each rhymed ABABCC, so an alternating quatrain is closed by a couplet. The lines are mostly iambic pentameter, steady and unhurried like the sun's own path. The first stanza's third line, "From the broad moonlight of the sky," is shorter than its neighbours. The couplets tend to deliver the claim or turn of each stanza: "Whatever lamps on Earth or Heaven may shine / Are portions of one power, which is mine." The poem follows a day, with dawn, the climb, noon, a reluctant descent into "the clouds of the Atlantic even," and a final stanza that steps outside time altogether.
The third stanza turns light into a moral force. The sunbeams are "shafts," arrows fitting for the archer god, and they kill "Deceit, that loves the night and fears the day." Light stands for honesty, and "good minds and open actions take new might" in it. The word "open" does double work, describing both actions done in daylight and minds that hide nothing. Even here the poem admits a limit, since that strength is "diminished by the reign of Night." The fourth stanza widens the claim. Apollo does not just illuminate but "feeds" clouds, rainbows and flowers "with their aethereal colours," and the moon and stars are "cinctured with my power as with a robe." The robe returns from stanza two, now wrapped around the night sky. All light, however faint, is "portions of one power."
The fifth stanza is the gentlest. At noon he stands "upon the peak of Heaven," then descends "with unwilling steps." The clouds "weep and frown" at his leaving, and he consoles them with a smile from "the western isle." The sunset becomes an act of tenderness, and the rhetorical question ("What look is more delightful...?") shows a god who is rather pleased with himself.
That pride becomes the subject of the last stanza, which is also the poem's most daring move: "I am the eye with which the Universe / Beholds itself and knows itself divine." The sun is no longer just the source of light but the means by which creation becomes aware of itself. It also echoes the opening, where Apollo's own eyes were "dim" with sleep, so the god who needed waking is now the universe's vision. The stanza then gathers Apollo's traditional domains, "harmony of instrument or verse," "prophecy," "medicine," and "all light of art or nature," in a run of "All"s that sweeps them into one source. The closing lines claim that "victory and praise in its own right belong" to his song. A hymn is normally sung to a god, but here the god sings his own, and you can hear that as either sublime confidence or magnificent vanity.
The poem is significant for how much it packs into a short space. It takes a familiar myth and makes it carry a bold idea, that light, truth, beauty and knowledge are one power, and that the mind perceiving the world belongs to that power. The poem leaves that boast standing, while the reference to Night keeps a little shadow at the edge of its brightness.