Few poems let a mind come apart as openly as this one. It begins with a question, "Art thou indeed forever gone," and the speaker spends the rest of the poem failing to accept the answer. The text never says who the beloved is or why they have gone, so we get only the loss and its aftershocks. The central idea is a cruel one. Remembered happiness doesn't comfort the speaker, it sharpens the grief, and even the escape of a dream only sets up a worse pain on waking.
The form helps convey that restlessness. The poem is one unbroken block with no stanza breaks, and its rhymes keep changing pattern. It opens with alternating rhymes (gone/alone, me/thee), slips into couplets, then settles briefly into a tidy enclosed pattern in the passage about the valley (vale, tomb, gloom, dale). Some rhymes arrive late. "Hell" has to wait until "swell" two lines on, as though the speaker's thoughts keep reaching for closure and missing it. The lines are mostly short, four-beat and iambic, which gives a quick, breathless pulse that suits the "panting breast." Cries of "Ah!" and "Oh!" keep breaking into that pulse and letting feeling spill over the metre.
Repetition is the poem's main tool. "Forever, ever," "never, never," "ever, ever": each time the speaker doubles a word of absolutes, as if pressing on a bruise to check it still hurts. The denials work the same way. "I do not reproach thee, dear!" is followed by "I do not blame thee, love; ah, no!" Insisting this often makes us wonder what is being held back, yet the speaker claims the heart "throbs for thy happiness alone." The word "alone" matters here. At the start the speaker asks, "Must this poor bosom beat alone," and in the dream the beloved promises, "I am thine, and thine alone." The same word describes first the speaker's isolation and then a lover's exclusive loyalty, and the second meaning only makes the first more painful.
The poem thinks in extremes. Love lifts mortals "to the height of Heaven" or dashes them "to the depths of Hell." The speaker says "I had never lived before," then, a few lines later, "now I cease to live again." Love was the only real life, so its end is a kind of death. Even the past is already half unreal, since the speaker thanks the beloved "for the dream" while still describing "two years of speechless bliss." That quietly prepares for the later vision, where happiness can be recovered only in sleep.
The best writing comes in the night scene. A "faint and distant scream" on the wind turns out to be a moan "for pleasures that are past," so the weather becomes the speaker's grief heard from outside. Time contradicts itself in "Oh! lagging hours, how slow you fly!" Then comes the poem's most original image, life as a "dark and lengthened vale" that "closes with the tomb." We expect the grave to be the darkest point, but the speaker says "darker is the lowering gloom / That shades the intervening dale." Death isn't the fear. The long stretch of living between now and death is.
The ending refuses any consolation. In "visioned slumber" the speaker hears the beloved's voice, and the only direct speech in the poem is a promise: "Confide in me." Waking destroys it, and the final three lines build to "A fiercer, deadlier agony!" The comparatives show the pain climbing instead of settling. The last word has no rhyme partner and only faintly echoes the earlier "memory" and "ecstasy," as though joy and memory both lead to this word.
Some of the diction is stock sentimental language ("poor bosom," "frenzied brain"), and a reader may find it overheated. The poem is still worth studying for how it traps its speaker. Memory, dream and waking each lead back to pain, and the structure makes us feel there is no way out.