Irene Fisher's sonnet begins with someone else's voice. The opening line, "I loved thee once, O Atthis, long ago," is attributed within the poem itself to Sappho ("So Sappho sang"), the ancient Greek poet who addressed Atthis in her verse. Fisher borrows the line, and then does something unexpected with it: she lets the quotation open the poem, return at its midpoint, and lose its sting. What begins as an echo of ancient loss ends as a quiet declaration of recovery.
The first eight lines are heavy with absence. The speaker mourns a voice that "nevermore will bring / The music of thy voice with all its low / Deep cadence to the listening ear." Notice how the sentence refuses to stay inside its line. "Low" ends one line and "Deep cadence" begins the next, so the sound literally sinks and lingers across the line break, as a voice might trail off. The tears are "slow dripping" and their sting is "salty," a pair of sensory details that make grief physical, almost a taste on the lips. Even the spring is described through loss: its "slender chords" cannot supply the missing music.
Then comes the poem's neatest trick. The first quatrain's closing line is the quotation again, reshaped. Where Sappho's line was a flat statement, the speaker's version, "How once I loved thee, Atthis, long ago," arrives inside a clause, as something she is "aware of." The words are identical in spirit but changed in function. The first time, they are a lament; the second time, they are a fact the speaker can hold at arm's length. The word "once" does the quiet work here, since it admits that the love belongs to the past, and that admission is the first step toward peace.
The turn arrives with a blunt little sentence: "I am not sad." After the long, looping syntax of the opening, the brevity is startling, and it marks the traditional pivot of the sonnet form. The rhyme scheme supports this shift. The octave is tightly knit, built on repeated sounds (ago, low, although; spring, bring, sting, upswing) that circle back on themselves like a mind caught in rumination. The closing sestet loosens that pattern into a different arrangement (drift, thine, lace, sign, lift, face), so the sonnet's music changes as the speaker's mood does. The meter is a flowing iambic line, close to the sonnet's traditional pentameter, which gives the poem a stately, measured pace even at its most emotional.
The imagery of the second half is where the healing becomes visible. "The white plum petals drift / Across my hair with touch as light as thine" is a lovely moment, because the dead or distant beloved is not erased but transformed into a gentle sensation, a touch carried by blossoms. The willows "lace / Their green against the sky," a verb that turns the whole landscape into delicate handiwork. Spring, which in the octave could only offer "slender chords" that failed to replace a voice, now acts as an active, consoling force. "It is the sign," the speaker says, as if nature itself has given permission to move on.
The final line is the most striking. The speaker does not say she has forgotten Atthis; instead she exclaims, "I see, O Atthis, wonders in thy face!" The address that began in mourning ends in wonder. This is a subtle but important choice. Recovery here does not mean abandoning the beloved but being able to remember her without pain, so that her face becomes a source of marvel rather than loss.
What makes the poem worth reading is this gentle argument about grief: that it can change shape without disappearing, and that an old, borrowed line of verse can be a ladder out of sorrow. Fisher compresses that whole movement, from tears to blossoms, into fourteen lines, and she does it by letting the same sentence mean two different things.