A speaker offers tenderness to someone in terrible pain, but the tenderness keeps slipping into something colder. The opening lines sound kind: "let me hold you as you cry." Then comes "let me soothe you as you die," and the comfort suddenly sits right beside death, as if the speaker is content to ease the suffering rather than stop it.
The last lines turn stranger. Calling the sufferer "infinitely awful" and "infinitely suffering" in the same breath mixes pity with disgust. The speaker seems to feel real compassion and, at the same time, a kind of revulsion. The single word "thing" is left alone at the end, and it strips the person of humanity. It repeats "you poor thing," but now it sounds less affectionate and more distant.
The mood is hushed, uneasy, and a little chilling. The title, "Sympathies," makes us wonder how sincere that sympathy is, and whether it can ever be free of judgment.