Before the poem names anyone, it makes the reader sink. "Deep deep down" is a diver counting off the metres, and what follows is a pile-up of failures: the place the speaker describes lies "further than the reach of natural will," "beyond the control of firm determination," "exceeding the range of self respect." Each phrase names a part of the mind that might have rescued him, and each is ruled out. The sentence also withholds its subject. Twelve lines of descent pass before "She" appears on the thirteenth, already seated. The delay mimics the plunge, and it makes her arrival feel like landing on the seabed.
The place itself is an odd mix of the grand and the abstract. A sea "flows from the bowels of my exceedingly pained heart," and at its bottom stands a "castle-like empire." Its building materials are nouns of confusion: "unexplainable emotions," "foolish decisions," "confusing reactions." Even the foundation is psychological, "a history of initially denied infatuations." Judging by that phrase, the speaker first refused to admit his feelings, and the denial now supports the whole structure. He is hard on himself here. He does not blame the queen for the empire. He lists his own muddle as its walls and guards.
The queen is the most contradictory figure in the poem. She is "resplendent in the glorious beauty beheld only by the blindness that has scaled my mind." That is a confession dressed as a compliment: only a mind that cannot see clearly could find her this dazzling. "Scaled" can mean climbed, like a wall in a castle story, and it can also suggest scales over the eyes, so one word covers both siege and blindness. Her baton "to conduct the melodies of my thoughts" makes him her orchestra. Then the quiet word "once" arrives, "in whose eyes my image was once accompanied by great admiration," and the admiration is gone. The most telling line is "A priceless treasure still not worth fighting for." The paradox is the poem's whole problem in miniature. He knows her value has collapsed, and he still cannot price her accurately.
At "Oh!" the grand imagery gives way to plain pleading. The musical thread resurfaces in "the outworn chord that is left of our connection." The spelling "chord" fits the orchestra, though it also faintly echoes a cord or rope, and either reading leaves him holding something nearly worn through. The questions that follow are the most effective writing in the poem. "What, then shall become of me? / Who, then shall I turn to? / How, then shall I survive? / For what course shall I live?" They are short, parallel and quickening, and they climb from practical worries to a question about purpose. The long, heavy lines of the opening have become something closer to short, panicked breaths.
The central idea comes when the throne returns: "Should the throne upon which she sat be left unoccupied and stone cold." Notice what he dreads. He does not mourn losing her so much as the vacancy. The throne sits in his own heart, and without a queen it would be an empty, freezing room. His next worry, about "what pace or to what rhythm shall the beat of my heart be played," shows he has handed over even his pulse. What he is clinging to is less a person than a structure that tells him what to feel and when.
The ending is a clever piece of self-doubt. He asks whether loneliness could "be soothed by mere words," which is a question about the poem he is writing. Poetry is made of exactly those words, and he suspects they will not be enough. The last line then shouts in capitals, "IF, I LET HER GO…", with an awkward comma and trailing dots. It never reaches an answer, and the poem stops on the conditional because the speaker cannot step past it. He sees his situation clearly, down to the blindness and the foolishness, and still cannot act on what he sees.
That gap between insight and action is what gives the poem its interest. It has no rhyme and no regular metre, and its diction is sometimes formal, but its extended metaphor of the heart as a sunken kingdom lets a familiar ache be examined as an architecture. For students, it shows how one sustained image, here the throne, can carry an argument from the first line to the last.