Someone is being looked at, and the looking is the whole drama of "A Star May Set." The speaker never describes the person behind the eyes. We learn nothing about who this is, whether a lover, a friend, or a child, and the poem is better for it. All we have is the pressure of a gaze that sees too much, and a speaker who would rather not be seen so clearly.
The opening line sets the terms: "Those eyes look in upon my soul." The preposition matters. These eyes do not merely look at the speaker; they look in, as if the body were a house with a window left uncurtained. By the second stanza the intrusion has moved from the soul to the heart, and it grows almost clinical, as the eyes "try to probe the number of its beats." There is something quietly unnerving about that image, a heartbeat being counted by a watcher while the owner stays silent. The soul is the place of questions; the heart is the place of feeling; and the speaker defends both.
What the speaker is defending is unclear, and the poem seems to know it. The "poor control / That stalks me through some inner door" is the most striking phrase in the poem, because it reverses expectations. We might think control is something we use to guard ourselves. Here it is feeble, and it "stalks," as though the speaker's own weakness were a predator moving through the private rooms of the mind. The poem suggests a person holding emotion in check with difficulty, and afraid of what would happen if the check gave way. Hence the line "How can I dare destroy the tears that start": the tears are rising, and to speak would be to let them fall. Note the verb "destroy," which is odd and revealing. Crying is not described as release but as destruction, of composure perhaps, or of the fragile arrangement that keeps "Life and its defeats" unspoken.
Structurally, the poem is tidy, and the tidiness is part of its meaning. Each stanza has four lines and an alternating rhyme scheme (soul/control, ignore/door; heart/start, beats/defeats), the kind of orderly pattern that mirrors the speaker's effort at self-possession. The meter is loosely iambic, with lines that run to about five stresses, and it stumbles slightly where the feeling presses hardest, so that the rhythm sounds like composure maintained with some effort. The first two stanzas also share an architecture: a statement about the eyes, then a question beginning "How can I." The repetition gives them the feel of a ritual, a speaker rehearsing the same helpless reply.
Then the third stanza turns, and the turn is the real achievement. The eyes now "look words I cannot answer yet." That small word "yet" changes the temperature of the poem. Silence, which had been shame or fear, becomes postponement. The speaker looks outward and upward, to "this universe or distant space," and hopes for a sign. The final image is the most ambitious: "a star may set, / And bursting, show to us a trysting place." A setting star that bursts is a strange picture, since stars set quietly, and the poem seems to be reaching for a moment of sudden, dramatic illumination, a flare in the dark. The word "trysting" is old-fashioned and tender, meaning a meeting place for lovers, and it quietly resolves the poem's tension. The "us" is the first moment the speaker and the watcher are joined in one pronoun. What could not be said across the gap between two people might be met somewhere beyond both of them.
The poem's lasting interest lies in that movement from exposure to hope. It does not claim the speaker will find the words, and the verbs stay conditional: "perhaps," "may," "sometime." But it makes room for the idea that some things between people cannot be spoken now and are not lost for that reason. Few short poems manage to be so honest about reticence while still leaving the door, the inner one that stalks the speaker, a little ajar.