The speaker is addressing a vanished beloved, someone she once adored with almost religious intensity, calling her “Idol of my Soul.” She floods her with memories: the beloved’s voice, her body, her music — everything that once swept the speaker into a blissful, aching delirium. She can’t believe this person could so quickly give up the gentle power that soothed love’s frenzy and made hope feel intimate and real. The first part of the poem is an astonished question: How can you forget all that?
Then the tone snaps into raw pleading. “Return! return!” Everything alive and warm has vanished without her — no spring, no sun, no sacred flame. Instead, the speaker’s inner world is locked in a permanent, cold darkness. The final image is a wasteland of loss: a lone funeral urn, a withered laurel crown (the symbol of poetic glory now dead), and a crumbling tomb. It’s a mood of desperate, almost theatrical sorrow, where love’s absence becomes a kind of death.