Six times the speaker of Robinson's "Absence" walks into a new setting, and six times the missing person arrives first. A windswept cliff above the sea, a quiet dusk, a noisy village, a May grove, morning prayers and a sleepless night each begin with the same word, "When". Each ends with the heart still aching. The central idea is that absence cannot be escaped by changing the scenery. Wild nature, gentle nature, company, pleasure and religion are all tried in turn, and none of them works.
The poem's structure makes that failure feel inevitable. Each stanza has eight lines of mostly regular iambic pentameter, rhymed ABABCCDD. The first four lines set the scene and the next two deepen the feeling. The last two lines then close on "smart" and "heart" almost every time: "awakes my smart / ... about my heart", "hide my smart / ... in my heart". Because the same rhyme returns, the stanzas feel like a closed circuit, and every route ends at the same place. The one exception is the fifth stanza, where "smart" gives way to "impart". At that moment the speaker is trying to argue the pain into something nobler.
The settings are carefully varied. The opening is rugged and sublime, with its "craggy mountain's pathless steep" and "flinty brow". The second stanza is gentle, with a hushed linnet and a breeze that barely stirs a rose. There the contrast is quietly cruel, because "Exhausted Nature steals to soft repose" while the speaker cannot. The same word returns in the last stanza ("I press my lonely couch to find repose"), and it is still out of reach. The sea simile is also odd. The waves are "Changing and treach'rous as the breath of LOVE", an image of inconstancy, though the speaker's own feeling is anything but inconstant. The line may hint at a worry about the beloved, though the poem never says so. In the grove stanza, Venus and Love scatter "thornless ROSES", a world designed to be painless, and the speaker carries pain into it anyway. Sound does similar work in the third stanza, where the speaker mistakes a bird's note for "thy fascinating song" and the "list'ning ear soon tells me 'tis not THEE".
The fifth stanza is the most revealing. Religion "forbids the sigh to heave, the tear to flow", and the speaker insists that "no vulgar passion fills my mind", only a "flame refin'd" lit by "calm REASON". Yet the vocabulary of flame, sighing and an "aching heart" sits uneasily with the claim of calm friendship. Judging by the imagery, the speaker is protesting a little too much. The poem keeps its official label of friendship, but the feeling it describes is far more consuming. The capital letters add to this. Personified abstractions such as LOVE, VENUS, RELIGION, REASON and DEATH are printed in capitals, as is the beloved's "THEE" and "THY". The beloved is thus given the same weight as the poem's grand allegorical figures.
The last stanza turns the poem's images back on themselves. The pale moon shines through a "mould'ring tow'r" where "the north-wind blows", and the setting has moved from open landscape to a cold, ruined, private space. The final line, "'Till DEATH's cold SPELL is twin'd about my HEART", echoes line eight of the first stanza, where the beloved's "dear image twines about my heart". The verb has hardened from "twines" to "twin'd", and the image of the beloved is now replaced by death. The speaker's only imagined release is the end of life itself.
The poem's significance lies less in surprise than in design. It is built from the conventional diction of its kind ("ZEPHYR", "Sylvan train", "dulcet numbers"), but it shapes that material into a tight pattern of repeated attempts and repeated defeats. Read closely, it shows how a poem can make a feeling seem inescapable through form as well as through statement.