Moore's poem makes an unusual promise. Most verses addressed to a grieving person hurry to cheer them up. This one asks three questions, lays out three disappointments, and then offers only company: "I'll weep with thee, tear for tear." The speaker mends nothing. The comfort is exact and equal, one tear given for every tear received, and that refusal to console is the poem's central idea. Sympathy, it suggests, may be worth more than advice.
The first stanza sets the mood with a quietly paradoxical thought. The listener's young days were fading too fast, and they "even in sorrow, were sweet." Sorrow and sweetness sit side by side, as if the real loss is not pain but the lost ability to feel anything strongly. The cloud image fits this. Clouds "o'er the morning fleet", so the shadow is real but passing, and what hurts is how quickly the morning goes. The stanza then ends on a bleaker image of Time's "cold wing" withering "each feeling that once was dear." The worst damage is numbness.
The next two stanzas turn the general ache into pictures, and both are pictures of false treasure. Love is a "Lagenian mine", a word meaning Leinster, which gives the poem an Irish setting. Gold glitters on the surface, but anyone who digs deeper, "allured by the gleam", finds the ore gone. The comparison also says something about closeness. The more deeply you pursue love, the emptier it turns out to be. Hope is a bird from "the story", a tale left unnamed and so feeling like folk memory. It flits "from tree to tree" with a glittering gem and shows it "branch after branch". The cruelty is in the timing: it flies off "when nearest, and most inviting." Hope here does not simply fail. It tempts, and that is worse. The three stanzas also move through a kind of time: the past that faded, the love that deceived, and the future that keeps slipping away.
The sound is as important as the images. The lines are light and lilting, with a gentle gallop of stressed and unstressed syllables, and the poem has the feel of a song lyric, the form Moore is famous for. The rhymes run ABABCDCD in every stanza, and the odd-numbered lines end on soft, two-syllable rhymes ("shaded/faded", "wither/hither", "alighting/inviting") that seem to trail off. The even-numbered lines end on single, firm syllables ("fleet", "sweet", "dear", "tear"). So each stanza sighs and then settles. This sweetness is risky, because a sad subject set to such a graceful tune could sound too pretty. The refrain-like ending keeps it honest.
That ending is where the poem becomes more than a list of complaints. Stanza four gathers the earlier questions into a triple "If", repeating the sentence pattern three times so the losses pile up. Then it returns to the opening lines almost word for word, with small changes. "Then, child of misfortune, come hither" becomes "Come, child of misfortune, come hither", and now the invitation is repeated and more urgent. Time's cold wing is replaced by "the cold world", so the withering is no longer an abstract force but something the listener has met among other people. Against that cold, the speaker offers warmth in the simplest form, a person who will stay and weep.
The poem lasts because it is modest. It does not argue that sorrow has a purpose, or that love and hope will return. It treats disappointment as ordinary and shared, and it gives a plain human answer to it. The words "child of misfortune" can sound old-fashioned, but the gesture behind them, sitting down beside someone and saying "I'll weep with thee", has not aged at all.