Few farewells in verse are as crowded as this one. Before the speaker mentions herself, she has taken leave of caves, sands, woods, sea-nymphs, mountain tribes and fawns. Only in line 13 do we learn her name, Sappho, and the reason for her leaving: Phaon, "faithless," lies elsewhere. The central idea is that heartbreak takes away the poet's voice as well as her lover. Sappho is a musician, yet in the eight lines she spends with her lyre, her fingers "sweep" the strings "in vain." The poem is about love, but it is also about an art that no longer works.
The form helps tell this story. The poem is a fourteen-line sonnet in iambic pentameter, and the numeral XIX in the title suggests it belongs to a longer sequence. The octave rhymes ABBAABBA, so its sounds keep circling back: *sands* and *bands*, *stands* and *commands*, *steep* and *deep*, *weep* and *sweep*. The effect is like a person pacing the same few feet of rock. The sestet changes to alternating rhymes (CDCDCD), which feels lighter and more restless. It also never closes with a neat couplet, because *fade* and *devours* rhyme with their alternates and not with each other. The poem simply stops, as if there were nothing left to say. The contracted spellings, "glitt'ring," "loit'ring," "cank'ring," keep every line to ten syllables, so the meter holds even while the speaker's world falls apart.
The opening is built from apostrophe, an address to things that cannot answer. The word "ye" appears seven times in four lines, and each time it calls up another piece of an enchanted landscape: "coral caves," "pearly sands," "waving woods," "glitt'ring deep." The adjectives are all shine and movement, a world made of jewels and water. Then comes the sharp turn to "the bleak rock," where the music of that first quatrain gives way to a single bare word. The rock may hint at the old legend of Sappho's fatal leap, though the poem never says so. Even without the legend, the contrast is plain: lush abundance behind her, a lonely height before her.
The sestet brings in a rival world. Phaon is "laid" in "Circe's cave," and the cave is the real hinge of the poem, since Sappho leaves one set of caves only to imagine her lover in another. Circe is the enchantress of myth who turns men into beasts, so the name casts the unseen rival as a sorceress, and Phaon as a man bewitched and so perhaps partly excused. "Daemons" crown him with "opiate flow'rs," which suggests drugged forgetfulness, while someone else's "am'rous strains" fill the "fateful hours." The music Sappho can no longer make is now being made for him, by another. The pomegranate shade is a pleasant detail with a sinister edge, since that fruit has long carried associations of both love and the underworld.
Look, too, at how the speaker names herself. She begins as "your frantic minstrel," a third-person description, switches to "my faithless Phaon," then ends with "Sappho's lips." She seems to watch herself from outside, as though she were already turning into a story. That distance makes the last two lines more chilling. Her lips "fade" to "paly ashes," and "sorrow's cank'ring worm" devours her heart. The canker worm is the creature that eats a bud from within, and the image reverses the earlier landscape of bright, flourishing things. Beauty has been replaced by slow, hidden decay.
What gives the poem its force is an irony it never mentions. Sappho says her touch no longer commands the lyre, yet the sonnet, its rhymes, its metre and its carefully chosen images, is itself an act of music. Grief has not silenced her. It has given her a subject, and the poem shows her mastery even as it says that mastery is lost. By speaking through a famous poet of the past, Robinson can treat heartbreak as a crisis of creative power and not only of feeling. That gives a fairly conventional abandonment story a double ache, because the person who has lost her lover is also the person who must sing about it.