Eight short lines, and nearly all the feeling sits in one reversal: the speaker's eyes can weep for Rose Aylmer but can never see her again. Landor builds the poem on the gap between what a person was and what a mourner is left able to do. By the end of the first stanza everything that could be said in her praise has been said. The second stanza is about what the living can give back.
The opening is an outburst: "Ah, what avails the sceptred race! / Ah, what the form divine!" These lines ask a question, yet they end in exclamation marks, as if the speaker already knows the answer and can't bear to say it. The key verb is "avails", meaning what good is it? The poem climbs through the things a society prizes. "Sceptred race" suggests rank and lineage, "form divine" suggests beauty, and "every virtue, every grace" suggests moral worth. The doubled "every" piles them up, and then the sentence stops on a plain, short line: "Rose Aylmer, all were thine." The poem never mentions death. We infer it from the second stanza, which is stronger for being left unsaid. The grand abstractions also tell us little about her. There is no hair, no voice, no gesture, only the vocabulary of praise, which feels hollow beside her name.
The form supports this. The rhyme scheme is a simple ABAB, and the lines alternate between four beats and three, the pattern of the ballad or hymn stanza. The longer lines carry the argument and the shorter ones drop like a held breath: "Ah, what the form divine!", "May weep, but never see," "I consecrate to thee." Both stanzas close on a rhyme with an intimate, old-fashioned pronoun, "thine" and "thee". The second pairing is the cruelest. "See" rhymes with "thee", yet seeing "thee" is exactly what is no longer possible.
The name does a lot of work. "Rose Aylmer" ends the first stanza's argument and opens the second as well, so it sits on the hinge between the two. The second stanza then shifts from abstractions to the speaker's body: "these wakeful eyes". "Wakeful" implies a sleepless vigil, and "these" makes the eyes present and physical, almost pointed at. The paradox is exact. Eyes exist to see, and his have been reduced to producing tears. The verb "may" even sounds like a permission, as though weeping were the only thing left to him.
The final two lines turn from loss to action. "A night of memories and sighs / I consecrate to thee." "Consecrate" is a religious word, meaning to make something holy, and it changes the nature of the gift. He offers no monument, no flowers and no promise of a reunion, only one sleepless night, given over to remembering. The tenses mark the shift. Her qualities are in the past ("all were thine"), while his act is in the present ("I consecrate"). The speaker also holds back until the last line, since "I" appears nowhere else. Only then does he step forward, and the poem becomes the act it describes. In saying the words, he gives the night.
What makes the poem worth reading closely is how much it refuses to do. It doesn't describe the grave or console with an afterlife, and it doesn't explain who Rose Aylmer was or how she died. The poem keeps to simple words and a plain stanza, and the feeling comes through the restraint. It shows that grief doesn't need length or decoration. A few exact choices will do, such as a verb like "avails", a paradox about eyes, and a single religious word placed where the poem turns from public praise to private devotion. It is short enough to memorise, and it still seems to leave something unsaid.