A goodbye that keeps turning into a boast: that is the strange energy of this sonnet. The speaker, who names herself Sappho in line ten, takes leave of the cedars and rivers where she once slept, bathed and was desired. The poem never says why she is leaving. The numbering ("Sonnet XXIX") suggests it belongs to a longer sequence, so any explanation presumably lies elsewhere. What the poem gives us is the loss itself, and its central idea is that her grief is inseparable from her pride. She mourns a place that adored her, and in doing so she shows how beautiful she was.
The form is carefully built. The octave rhymes ABBAABBA (shade, rest, breast, array'd, play'd, quest, drest, aid) and the sestet runs CDCDCD, a Petrarchan shape in which the turn comes at line nine. The lines are iambic pentameter, with elisions like "tow'ring," "Lull'd" and "hover'd" keeping the count tidy. The octave is a single sentence that unspools through two "While" clauses, so the syntax seems to drift the way the sleeper does. Then line nine breaks in with "Farewell, ye limpid rivers! Oh! farewell!", and the interruption feels like waking up. Even the diction, with its "ye," "erst" and "grots," is deliberately elevated and old-fashioned, which suits a speaker who addresses trees and rivers as though they could answer.
The octave is lavish with the senses. We get the nightingale's song, "spicy breezes" that "fan my cheek," and the colour deepening there, then insects "humming round me." The turn comes when the insects abandon every flower "of prouder sweets in quest." The prouder sweets are her lips, "in humid fragrance drest." They "mock'd the Sunny Hybla's vaunted aid," which makes sense once you know that Hybla, in Sicily, was famous for its honey. Her mouth beats the most celebrated sweetness in the classical world. Nature behaves like an attendant here: the cedars shade her, the breezes fan her, and the bees choose her over the flowers.
In the sestet the element changes from air and scent to water. The repeated "No more" gives the farewell the slow weight of a bell, and "farewell" itself is answered by the rhymes "swell" and "cell." The verb "swell" is used twice, once for the white waves rising to her bosom, and the water seems to respond to her body as the insects did. But the texture is cooler now. "Dank weeds" entwine her "floating hair," and the pleasure has a damp, uneasy edge. Readers who know the legend of Sappho's end may hear a shadow in that floating hair, though the poem itself never mentions it, so that is an inference. What the text does give us is the sense that the sweet, dry fragrance of the first half has given way to something colder.
The last two lines save the poem's boldest move. "As erst," meaning once, Venus sat "in her sparry cell," a glittering mineral grotto, and "Wept, to behold a brighter goddess there!" The line opens on a stressed "Wept," so the grief lands before we know whose it is. The goddess of beauty is reduced to tears by a mortal's radiance, and the poem leaves us to infer that the brighter goddess is Sappho. The farewell that began in humility ends with her outshining a goddess.
That mix of loss and self-assertion is what makes the poem worth reading closely. Sappho is both the one who suffers and the one everything desires, and she is the subject of the poem as well as its most dazzling object. She describes herself as nature's favourite and as Venus's rival. Her lament is never merely passive, because every "No more" is also a reminder of how much there was. The poem is a goodbye, but it is also a portrait, and the portrait is what stays with the reader.