A voice that can make wild rocks ring with applause still cannot bring one man back. That gap between artistic power and helplessness in love drives Robinson's sonnet. The speaker, who calls herself "the Lesbian Muse" and finally names herself Sappho, opens by recalling her songs, so admired that even Echo fell in love with them. She then turns to a prayer: Venus, send back Phaon, "he, whom my soul has fir'd." What looks like a hymn of praise is really a negotiation, and its closing lines name the price.
The form shows how carefully the plea is built. The octave rhymes *abba abba*, in the Petrarchan pattern, and the sestet loosens into alternating *cdcdcd*. Because the sestet ends on "prepare" and "Nine" rather than a tidy couplet, the poem finishes on a long, open rhyme, as if the promise were still hanging in the air. The lines are iambic pentameter, and the many contractions ("admir'd," "am'rous," "madd'ning," "pray'r," "ev'ry," "tend'rest") squeeze words into that ten-syllable frame. They also give the speech a breathless, strained quality. The *b* rhymes of the octave, "admir'd," "inspir'd," "fir'd," "desir'd," form a chain from admiration through inspiration to burning desire. The sound itself carries the poem's argument that art and passion come from the same fire.
Sound dominates the opening imagery. Echo, the wild rocks, the "madd'ning plaudits" all make the world around the singer into an enormous audience. Then the poem narrows sharply to "these fond arms," a phrase repeated twice in two lines. The first time it asks for something to be brought *to* them, and the second time it records that he has been "remov'd" *from* them. The repetition leaves the arms empty in a way no description could. The syntax of lines 6 to 8 also loses its footing, with semicolons and interruptions piling up before the sentence reaches "Though love, exulting, spreads his varying wing!" Love is pictured as a bird that is triumphant and changeable, flying where it likes while the speaker stays on the ground.
The sestet gets more specific. "Phaon" is held back until line 11, after Venus has been praised as "source of ev'ry joy! of ev'ry care." The line is a neat paradox, since the goddess who gives happiness also gives pain, and the speaker needs her for both. The beloved's name finally arrives next to a startling self-description, "Phaon's victim." Then the speaker slips into the third person: "her warmest, tend'rest vows," "Sappho shall a wreath prepare." She seems to watch herself from outside, as if she were a legend already. This does not cool the feeling. It makes the prayer more formal, like a vow spoken at an altar, and it keeps reminding us that the woman begging is also the famous poet.
The bargain follows. "So shall her warmest, tend'rest vows be thine" is a conditional, a favour for a favour, and what Sappho offers in return is verse. The wreath she will "prepare" stands for a poem, a crown for Venus and for Love. The last line makes the exchange enormous: "And Love be crown'd, immortal as the Nine." The Nine are the Muses, so Sappho promises that her art will give love the permanence of poetry. The poem quietly admits that love is changeable (that "varying wing"), while song can last. The speaker's strongest weapon is her talent, and she offers to put it at the goddess's service in exchange for the return of one person.
Part of what makes the sonnet interesting is how it joins private longing to public ambition. Its title marks it as one numbered poem in a longer run, and it feels like a single scene of a larger story. It gives a famous ancient poet a voice of urgent, personal pleading, so that the person who could once move rocks now has to ask. The grand, exclamatory style, full of "O!" and "Oh!", might look overdone, but the sonnet's structure keeps it from tipping into mere gush. The rhyme chain, the repeated "fond arms," and the closing bargain give the emotion a clear shape, and the poem ends by claiming that desperate love might be made to last forever.