A man has gone off to Sicily, and the woman he left behind will not let him go quietly. The speaker is Sappho, and the man is Phaon, who has fled to "AEtna's scorching sands." The sonnet is her appeal, part accusation and part ultimatum. Its central idea is that her passion is more violent than the volcano he has run toward. She asks him to think about whether Sicily can offer him anything to match it, and then offers a stark choice: "one kind word" or death.
The poem's construction makes that appeal feel inescapable. The octave rhymes ABBAABBA and the sestet settles into CDCDCD, so it follows the Italian pattern with a turn at line 9, where "Ah! think" breaks the run of questions. Before that, Sappho pelts Phaon with them: can other charms prove attractive, can Sicilian loves move his passions, has Spring crowned him, does he languish in the grove? She never waits for an answer, and the questions come so fast that they sound more like jealousy than curiosity. The rhyme words of the first quatrain and its partners are also telling: "flies," "eyes," "dies," "sighs." His flight, his fickle gaze, her death and the sighs of lovers all rhyme with one another, so the poem's whole story is already contained in its sounds. The line "False Youth!" is a sharp, direct charge, and it is the only moment in the octave when the questions stop and she names his fault.
The imagery works in the same way, through fire and crowns. Fire is everywhere. Aetna scorches, the Idalian altar "kindles, fann'd by Lover's sighs," and finally Sappho's breast holds "a fire, more fierce than AEtna's." The altar, which the poem ties to the grove of Venus by its use of "Idalian," is a quiet preparation. There the sighs of other lovers feed the flame, while Sappho's own sighs go unanswered. Then the poem moves the fire inside her, and the volcano becomes a yardstick that she beats. The crowns tell a parallel story. Spring offers Phaon "a crown of poppies," flowers of sleep and forgetting, which suggests he has drifted into easy oblivion. The Sicilian nymphs wear "garlands gay," while Sappho's brows are "drest" with "cypress wreaths," the tree of mourning. Her head is crowned too, but with grief, and the contrast of "gay" and cypress sets the two worlds against each other. The poppies also point ahead to the last line, where "eternal slumbers" is a darker kind of sleep that she is willing to take instead.
The sestet changes the poem's manner as well as its argument. The questions give way to commands: "think," "Nor deck," "Let one kind word," "bid them rest." One small shift is worth noticing. In the octave Sappho addresses Phaon with the intimate "thy" and "thou," but in line 9 he becomes "you," which may add a touch of distance as her patience thins. The language of the final couplet is almost commercial, since a kind word would "repay" her woes, as if his affection were a debt. Yet the final line turns away from bargaining. If he will not pay, then she asks him to put her suffering to rest in death. Love, in this poem, leaves no middle ground.
Sappho also talks about herself in the third person: "the Lesbian Sappho dies," "Sappho's brows." It is a curious effect, as if she already sees herself as a tragic figure on a stage, and perhaps this is why her pain feels so formal and so ceremonial. The sonnet's number in the title suggests it belongs to a longer sequence, and the poem does read like one scene from a continuing drama. The pentameter is steady and the rhymes are exact, with scarcely a line spilling over its end. That control is the interest of the poem. Strict form does not dampen the emotion but concentrates it, so that a woman's anguish is held in fourteen tightly shaped lines, and the heat that burns "more fierce than AEtna's" still comes through.