A voice cries out to a vanished beloved, asking if she is truly gone forever. The speaker’s heart beats only for her, and he questions why love was given to mortals—it can lift to Heaven or dash to Hell. He does not blame her; his agony is a fruitless sickening thrill that reason cannot blot from memory. He recalls a day when even wild ecstasy was coldness to the joy he knew, and says he had never lived before those blisses, now gone, so he ceases to live again.
Night falls, dark and windy. A distant scream on the blast moans for pleasures past. He sees a dark valley leading to the tomb, but the gloom over the intervening dale is darker still. In a brief dream he shares her smile again, hears her promise of eternal devotion—then wakes to a fiercer, deadlier agony. The mood is one of relentless heartbreak, mingling thankfulness for the dream with torment over its loss, until memory becomes a shriek of pain.