The grave at the centre of this elegy belongs to a character in a novel, yet the poem mourns him with the ceremony usually kept for a dead friend. Werter is Goethe's lovelorn hero, and Charlotte, named in the last stanza, is the woman he cannot have. The poem never retells the story. It assumes the reader already knows it, and that Werter's death was a suicide. The signature is simply "Robinson", and no date is given, so the poem has to be read on its own terms.
Its central idea is that feeling can do what the Church will not. The poem admits that Werter has a "crime" and a "frailty", then lets both evaporate: "as the balmy dew ascends to heaven, / Thy crime shall steal away." The last stanza makes the point sharper. The "churlish priest", a phrase the poem puts in quotation marks to show it is borrowed (it echoes Laertes at Ophelia's graveside in *Hamlet*), withholds the burial rites. Charlotte's tear takes their place, and in the final line "HEAVEN'S OWN INCENSE CONSECRATE THE SHRINE." The capitals make the line sound like a verdict. Nature and sympathy outrank the priest.
Water carries the whole poem. In the opening lines the day has a "closing eye" that weeps "lucid tears" onto a lily. Human tears then "gem the pale primrose" on the grave, and by the end the "sparkling dews of Evening" shine over it. Tears become dew and dew becomes jewellery, so grief is made beautiful and even a little holy. The effect is that the landscape seems to mourn along with the human mourners, and weeping looks like part of nature's order rather than a private weakness.
The poem also looks forward. The opening promises "Of THEE I'll sing", but after that nearly every verb is "shall": the tear "shall oft" fall, the maid "shall stroll along", the dews "shall shine". The poem builds a ritual for future visitors, with a lovelorn girl wandering under the lime-tree, her "cold blood freezing at the night-owl's song". A note marked by an asterisk after "Lime-tree's" is not included in the text supplied, so I can't say what it explains. The grave becomes a place of pilgrimage, and the girl's pleasurable shiver is part of the effect. The capitalised abstractions, SYMPATHY and SENSIBILITY, stand like attendants at the ceremony. Sensibility, the late-eighteenth-century cult of delicate feeling, is addressed directly: "Thy pow'r, O SENSIBILITY!" Weeping is treated as proof of a good heart.
The form follows this changing mood. The stanzas vary in length (ten lines, then six, eight, six and six), and the rhymes are mostly couplets or alternating pairs, with pentameter lines that give the pace of a slow walk. Twice the poem stretches a final line past its neighbours. "Thy pow'r, O SENSIBILITY! in magic charms to speak!" runs long, as if the speaker cannot stop at the usual place. The fourth stanza adds a quieter image: a star shines for a "poor PILGRIM" far from home. Its light is "short-liv'd" and "transitory", yet it still "soothes his sad heart". The next stanza begins "So", linking the star to Charlotte's tear. Both are brief and fragile, and both comfort anyone lost in the dark.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it treats fiction as seriously as fact. A made-up death is given a real grave, real mourners and a real moral argument about who deserves forgiveness. It is also a clear example of the sentimental elegy, in which the reader's own tears are part of the monument. Some of its phrases now seem over-sweet, such as "Sweet victim of love's power". Still, its central gesture has force. Faced with an institution that refuses mercy, it answers with an alternative: a small drop of water, shining on a primrose, is made to count as a sacrament.