The speaker is addressing someone deeply loved — likely a child — with a painful kind of foresight. She senses that this person is almost too perfect, too fragile to remain in her life for long. The poem isn’t about a loss that has already happened; it’s about the dread of one to come. Every sweet word and small gesture is already being treasured because she believes they are numbered. There’s a quiet sorrow running underneath the gentle observations, a feeling of holding on while bracing for emptiness. The images are delicate but haunted: fluttering hands that trigger fear, a mist that dims beauty like a star blurred by cloud. The mood is tender and elegiac, a slow, intimate mourning for someone still present. By the end, the speaker decides that memory will be a lasting home — her heart will hold onto the child she knows, just as a shell holds the echo of the sea long after the tide has gone.
Prevision — Summary
I know you are too dear to stay; You are so exquisitely sweet: My lonely house will thrill some day To echoes of your eager feet.
I hold your words within my heart. So few, so infinitely dear; Watching your fluttering hands I start At the corroding touch of fear.
A faint, unearthly music rings From you to Heaven — it is not far! A mist about your beauty clings Like a thin cloud before a star.
My heart shall keep the child I knew. When you are really gone from me. And spend its life remembering you As shells remember the lost sea.