The lid comes off in the first line, and everything after happens beside a coffin. "You opened the lid with morbid curiosity" sounds almost like a charge read out in court, and it is where the poem borrows from its ancient source. In the myth of Eros and Psyche, a mortal woman who has been forbidden to see her lover lights a lamp to look at him. A drop of hot oil wakes him, and he flees. Mike Stone keeps the forbidden looking, the flame and the vanishing love, but reverses the scene. The one being looked at is no sleeping god. It is a corpse, and the speaker seems to be lying in the god's place.
The title does a second job. "Psyche" is the Greek word for soul, so when the speaker says his eyes were "Emptied of my dusty soul so long ago," the line quietly says that he has lost the very thing her name means. The figure with the torch is a Psyche who has come to find one. One flame lights "your exquisite face and my dead eyes," and the grammar puts the two side by side. "Exquisite" faces "dusty" across a few lines, and the light shows the gap between the living and the dead more than it joins them.
Then she speaks, and her words are strange. "Life is a betrayal of death" turns the usual idea upside down. We normally think of death as the betrayal of life, but here staying dead seems to be the faithful state, and being called back is the treachery. She follows this with a kiss on the eyelids that "shut" them. That is what mourners do for the dead, yet it comes just before the command "rise up." The gesture is a funeral rite and a resurrection spell at once. The poem has no quotation marks, so her words slide into the narration, and the speaker barely has a voice of his own. He only receives instructions: "Take my hand and trust me." The phrase "grave countenance" also works twice. It means a solemn face and a face of the grave, and the speaker is being asked to rise out of both.
The form is bare. There is no rhyme and no steady metre. Almost every line is a plain, end-stopped statement, and the language never decorates itself. The long word "curiosity" ends the first line with a drawn-out, accusing weight that none of the later lines match. On the page, the first four lines are spaced apart, like separate glances in the dark. From "Life is a betrayal of death" onward the lines run close together, as though the action speeds up once she begins to talk. The verbs follow the same arc. She "opened," "lit," "said," and "kissed," and then a spark "leapt," a quick and almost living word. The last verb is "drifted," which is slow and has nobody behind it. The sound patterns tighten at the end too, with "shadowed shroud" hissing softly and echoing the earlier "dead" and "dusty."
The ending is the most open part of the poem. The spark lands on the shroud, and the "dream of love" goes "skyward." That can be read as smoke from a burning cloth, as a spirit released, or as Eros flying away again, as he does in the myth. It can be read as rescue or as loss, and the word "dream" hints that the love may never have been solid. The poem will not say which, and that is its main strength.
What makes it worth reading is how much it fits into ten lines. It takes a story about the cost of seeing someone, and turns it into a question about what happens when love tries to revive what has gone cold. The torch that reveals the beloved also sets fire to the shroud. The poem suggests that being seen and being saved may not be the same thing, and that the light which gives us back to someone can also be what makes love slip away.