The speaker of this sonnet is giving orders for her own burial. She calls on the "Aonian maids divine," the Muses, to weave wreaths for the "tranquil bed where I shall sleep." Death is a bed, and the funeral a quiet arrangement she supervises herself. Yet the poem is not calm. It builds toward its last line, where all the gentle scenery turns into an accusation: Phaon will shed "pearls of pity" over "the vanquish'd heart he scorn'd to save." The name Phaon suggests the speaker is the legendary Sappho, though the poem never says so, and the title's number suggests it belongs to a longer sequence. Either way, the idea at its center is clear. Grief imagines a future in which the person who caused it is finally forced to feel it.
The imagery starts with the Muses and stays close to poetry. Erato, whom the speaker asks to "twine" the "trophies," is the Muse of love poetry, so the funeral is partly a literary honor. Myrtle and laurel are steeped "in tears," which joins love and poetic glory in one gesture and soaks both in sorrow. The speaker is a lover and a poet at once, and she cannot separate the two. Then she rejects the usual markers of fame: "No parian marble, there, with labour'd line, / Shall bid the wand'ring lover stay to weep." Carved stone would be a public, finished monument. She wants something quieter, where "holy silence shall her vigils keep." There is a small irony here, because the poem itself is the monument she says she doesn't need. It is carved in fourteen careful lines.
The sound and shape support this. The rhymes are tightly built. The first eight lines follow the pattern ABBA ABBA, so *divine* and *twine* frame *sleep* and *steep*, and *line* and *mine* frame *weep* and *keep*. The rhyme words are mostly sorrowful ones, and the closed pattern makes the grief feel enclosed, like a tomb. The sestet changes to alternating rhymes: *spread*, *head* and *shed* answer *wave*, *grave* and *save*. The effect is a gentle rocking, like the swaying plants it describes, until the final couplet-like pairing of *shed* and *save* brings the sense of blame. The rhythm is a steady iambic pentameter, with the stress falling regularly on words like "wreaths," "tears," "silence" and "woes." The regularity gives her dignity, a speaker too composed to rant.
One structural detail is especially good. In a sonnet of this kind, the sense often turns after line eight. Here the sentence runs straight across the break: "There holy silence shall her vigils keep, / Save, when the nightingale such woes as mine / Shall sadly sing." The silence is interrupted before the octave even ends, as though the speaker can't hold back her grief long enough to finish a tidy section. The nightingale is the traditional bird of lament, and she claims its song as her own: its "woes" are "such woes as mine."
The final six lines make a small garden of mourning. The "branching lotos" waves, "sprinkling soft show'rs upon the lily's head." The lily is a "sweet drooping emblem for a lover's grave," and the word *drooping* does a lot of work, since it makes the flower look as if it bows in grief. The soft *s* and *w* sounds ("sprinkling soft show'rs," "widely wave") make the scene hushed and watery, so that nature seems to weep on her behalf before Phaon arrives.
When he does, the vocabulary suddenly turns hard and bright. Tears become "pearls," and they "gem" her heart. The metaphor is beautiful but also pointed: his sorrow is decoration, a jewel that comes too late. The words "vanquish'd" and "scorn'd" are blunt, and the last line leaves no doubt who is responsible. She wins nothing except his regret, but she makes sure it is on record.
What makes the poem memorable is this mix of tenderness and reproach. It borrows classical machinery, with its Muses, laurel and nightingale, but uses it for something personal and almost cutting. The speaker controls everything: the flowers, the silence, even Phaon's tears. In the one situation where she is powerless, she writes herself the last word.