Waking is supposed to be a relief, and the first line of this sonnet treats it like one: "I wake! delusive phantoms hence, away!" The speaker orders the dream-figures out as if they were intruders. But the next thirteen lines show that the order doesn't work. Morning arrives in full splendour, and the sorrow the dream stirred up is still there. The central idea is that grief can't be escaped by waking, and a person can stand in a beautiful landscape and still be shut inside a wound.
Even while banishing the phantoms, the speaker admits how fragile any calm is. "The softest breeze can shake the halcyon's nest, / And lightest clouds o'ercast the dawning ray." The halcyon belongs to the old legend of a bird that nests on a calm sea, so it is a creature of peace. The superlatives "softest" and "lightest" show how little it takes to disturb that peace. Then comes sunrise, and the image is stranger than it first looks: the "star of day / Peers, like a gem on Aetna's burning crest!" A jewel set on a volcano puts beauty and danger in one picture, and the verb "peers" makes the sun cautious, as if it were checking whether the world is safe. The welcome that follows, to hills "with golden vintage drest" and "vallies gay," sounds willed rather than felt. The speaker addresses the scenery directly ("Wellcome, ye Hills"), the way you greet guests you are determined to enjoy. The exclamation marks pile up to keep the mood bright.
The turn arrives exactly where a sonnet's turn should, at line nine. The rhyme scheme marks it. The octave is tightly enclosed (*away / breast / nest / ray*, then *day / crest / drest / gay*), like a room with the door shut on the outside world. The sestet loosens into an alternating pattern, *Isle / Song / smile / throng / beguile / long*. The viewpoint shifts too, from "I" to "she." "A mournful stranger, from the Lesbian Isle" points to Lesbos, and since she is praised in "loftiest eulogy of Song," the poem seems to be invoking Sappho. That is an inference from the clues, not something the poem states. There is a quiet pun in "stranger" and "Not strange." She is foreign to this sunny Sicilian scene, yet she is a familiar presence in the praise of poetry.
The poem then lists her powers over other people: she could "teach the Stoic's cheek to smile," "Thaw the cold heart," and "chain the wond'ring throng." Those verbs are all about control. Then comes the reversal: she "can find no balm, love's arrows to beguile." The woman who can move a crowd has no power over her own pain. The poem never says outright whether the stranger and the waking speaker are the same person. The "lover's breast" of line two and this mournful figure seem to merge, as if the speaker were stepping outside herself to see her own case as a famous one.
The last line is the most carefully balanced: "Ah! Sorrows known too soon! and felt too long!" It is almost all one-syllable words, and it sets "soon" against "long" so that grief starts too early and never finishes. The rhyme adds a further layer. "Song," "throng" and "long" share one sound, so the poem ties fame, admiring crowds and suffering together in the ear. The poem's steady iambic pentameter also matters, because the regular beat makes each exclamation feel like a crack in something the speaker is trying to hold together.
What gives the poem its interest is that it dramatises a failed recovery within fourteen lines. The speaker tries to wake up, look at the sun and welcome the day, and the form shows the attempt collapsing at the turn. The final suggestion is that even art and admiration offer no cure for private feeling. The numbering in the title suggests the sonnet belonged to a longer sequence, but it holds up alone as a small drama of morning, effort and defeat.