Few poems begin with an accusation and end with a quiet triumph, but "Treasure" does exactly that. A man scolds the woman he loves for waking from a dream at the worst possible moment, just as he was about to buy her a diamond. He is genuinely aggrieved. She, drowsy and amused, understands something he does not, and the whole poem is the gap between those two kinds of knowing.
The first stanza belongs to his voice. It is built from quoted speech, and the quotation marks matter: we hear him before we hear her. His complaint arrives in a rush of broken phrases and dashes: "Why did you then awaken me from sleep— / That was a thoughtless, foolish thing to do." The dashes make him sound flustered, almost comically wounded, as though she had committed a real offence against his generosity. The detail he gives is lavish and specific: the stone is "emerald cut and river blue," a phrase that makes the jewel sound cool, flowing and expensive all at once. "River blue" is a nice touch, since it borrows from nature to describe something that has actually been dug out of it and polished. He has "wished to give you all these years," which tells us this is not a casual gesture. His love is real, and he expresses it in the only currency he trusts.
Then comes the turn, in a line that is easy to rush past: "My drowsy shred of laughter broke in two." The woman's reaction is physical and small, a scrap of laughter, not a speech. The word "drowsy" keeps her half inside the dream he is describing, and "broke in two" suggests that her amusement carries a tinge of tenderness, perhaps even a little sadness. The next line, "If only I could make him understand!", reads as spoken inwardly, and it is the emotional hinge of the poem. She does not argue back. The explanation she cannot give him aloud is given to us instead, and that makes the second stanza feel like a confidence.
That second stanza shifts from dialogue to reflection, and the language shifts with it. The jewel imagery does not disappear, but it changes hands. Love itself becomes the "peerless shining crown," and women who wear it are "wrapt in the splendor of its single light." Notice the word "single": a diamond has many facets, but love's light is singular and undivided, which quietly makes it the more concentrated of the two. The comparison is that love makes a woman "more regally adorned" than "gems that would a queen delight." The poem borrows the vocabulary of wealth, crowns, queens and splendor, to argue that wealth is the lesser thing.
What keeps this from becoming a sermon against jewellery is the line "I still adore some glitter on my arms / The sheen of glowing pearls about my hair." She is not a saint of austerity. She likes pearls, and she says so. That honesty makes her final claim far more convincing. She is not renouncing luxury; she is ranking it. The closing couplet, "But not for rajah's hoard would I exchange / The treasure that within my heart I bear!", reaches for the most extravagant image available, a rajah's entire hoard, and still declares it insufficient. The title finally lands here: the real "Treasure" is not the diamond in the dream but the feeling that was present all along.
Formally, the poem is steady and conventional, in the best sense. The lines run in a loose iambic pentameter, with the rhyme scheme (sleep/do/take/blue... hand/understand) not rigidly regular but carried by recurring sounds. That relaxed, speaking-voice rhythm suits a poem built from a moment of domestic conversation. The one place the rhythm quickens is the man's opening protest, which tumbles forward in the way real complaints do.
The poem is worth reading because of its gentle reversal. The man offers a gift that can be bought, the woman holds a gift that cannot, and neither is foolish. His dream is an act of love; her laughter is an act of love too. The poem's quiet insight is that the most valuable things are often invisible to the very people who are trying hardest to give you something valuable.