Four short lines, one question, one exclamation, and an entire emotional history compressed between them. "Minx" belongs to the kind of poem that works by leaving almost everything unsaid. We never learn who "you" is, why they left, or what the speaker once felt. We are given only a single night's dream and the speaker's startled reaction to it. Yet the poem's central idea comes through clearly: the people we believe we have put behind us can reclaim their power over us in an instant, and the discovery is both unsettling and strangely revealing.
The opening question, "Why did you in a dream return last night," is addressed to someone who cannot answer. That is part of its pathos. The speaker is not really asking for information; she is protesting, perhaps even accusing. The word order is slightly formal and inverted ("Why did you in a dream return"), which gives the line a slightly old-fashioned, composed tone, as if the speaker is trying to hold herself together even while she is rattled. The phrase "last night" keeps the event fresh. This is not a reflection from a safe distance but a reaction in the immediate aftermath of the dream, when its feeling has not yet faded.
The second line carries the poem's quiet irony. "When you had safely gone so long ago" — the word "safely" is the one to watch. Safe for whom? Presumably for the speaker, whose life had settled into peace once this person departed. The adverb reveals that the departure was, at some level, a relief, a kind of protection. But "safely" also implies that the person once posed a danger. A figure whose absence must be called "safe" was clearly once a threat to the speaker's composure. The title now begins to make sense. A "minx" is a word for a cheeky, teasing, slightly troublesome woman, and its playful tone sits oddly against the speaker's unease. Whether the title names the person in the dream or is an affectionate, exasperated label the speaker gives her, it suggests someone charming and disruptive, not someone merely painful. The poem's mood is therefore more complicated than simple grief. There is exasperation here, and perhaps a trace of fondness.
The final two lines turn from the past to the present moment of the dream. "I was surprised to see you standing there" has a flat, almost conversational plainness, and the verb "standing" gives the image a stillness, as though the figure simply appears and waits, making no effort and needing none. The last line breaks into an exclamation: "To find that you could still disturb me so!" Here the restraint cracks. The word "still" is the emotional hinge of the whole poem, because it admits that the speaker had assumed the effect was over. "Disturb" is a carefully chosen verb: it is neither "hurt" nor "delight" but something more ambiguous, a stirring-up of settled water. And "so" leaves the degree of the disturbance unmeasured, which lets the reader imagine it as large as they like.
Formally, the poem is a quatrain in a recognisable rhythm of roughly five stresses per line, close to iambic pentameter, which gives it a measured, speech-like flow. The rhyme falls on the second and fourth lines ("ago" and "so"), a pattern that lets the first and third lines hang open. That structure suits the content. The two rhyming words are the poem's emotional anchors: "ago" marks the distance of time, "so" marks the surprising nearness of feeling, and chiming them together forces the reader to hear the two in conflict.
The significance of the poem lies in this economy. In four lines it captures a universal experience, the dream that undoes years of self-composure, without sentimentality or explanation. It trusts the reader to supply the story, and in doing so makes the feeling feel like our own.