Summary
The first eight-line stanza begins with the speaker telling a lover that the two will share only one kiss before parting ways. He repeats the sentiment, lamenting that they will say farewell to one another and then be apart forever. The speaker will clearly not enjoy the farewell. He says that he'll pledge his loyalty to the listener through tears, sighs, and groans. He asks, rhetorically, how anybody could consider themselves unfortunate when they still have even a bit of hope. But, the speaker says, he is truly unfortunate. He doesn't even have a flicker of hope. Instead, he's surrounded by despair and darkness.
Analysis
From the start of this poem, it's clear that this is an aubade. An aubade doesn't have to follow any specific form or structure. Instead, it's a poem describing a specific situation. Traditionally, an aubade is a song sung from one lover to another at dawn, as they part from each other. We don't have any evidence that this takes place at dawn, but it's certainly written from the perspective of one lover parting from another. However, these lovers aren't merely saying goodbye until the next time they can meet. Instead, this poem expresses a desperate heartbreak before they say goodbye for what looks like the rest of their lives. In fact, some of the images used here make it seem as if the lover barely exists anymore. The speaker is focused on his own experience of grief, as if the heartbreak is a more vivid presence than the person who caused it. For instance, the speaker refers to his "heart-wrung tears," and even personifies his "warring sighs and groans." He also personifies both fortune and despair, asking "Who shall say that Fortune grieves him?" and then noting "Dark despair around benights me." He's surrounded by his own emotions and reactions, brought to life through figurative language. What he doesn't have much of is human company—he's all alone.
Meanwhile, a read through the poem's first stanza reveals its highly regimented structure. The stanza's meter, for instance, never changes. Each line is made up of eight syllables. These eight syllables can be subdivided into four sets of two-syllable trochees. Trochees are a type of poetic foot in which a stressed syllable is followed by an unstressed one, such as in the word "warring." Since each line has four trochees, the poem's meter is trochaic tetrameter. Burns sticks to this meter even when maintaining it requires him to invert expected sentence structures, saying things like "Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee" rather than the more natural-sounding but metrically inconsistent "I'll pledge thee deep in heart-wrung tears." As a result, despite the emotional intensity of the subject matter, this poem doesn't give the impression of a raw outpouring of emotion. Instead it feels unrelenting and effortful, like the speaker is working hard to express himself.
The rhyme scheme of "Ae Fond Kiss" is also unerringly consistent. The first two lines of stanza one rhyme, ending with the words "sever" and "forever." So do lines three and four, which both end with the word "thee." Lines five and six, similarly, both end with the word "him," and lines seven and eight both end with the word "me." This means that our rhyme scheme is AABBCCDD, dividing the stanza into four rhymed couplets. These couplets don't just go together in terms of how they sound. Each of these two-line segments also addresses a particular aspect of the speaker's situation. In most cases, the couplet is actually a sentence, stretched across exactly two lines with a comma or colon ending the first line of the couplet and a period or question mark closing out the second line. Thus the first couplet of the poem sets the scene, explaining that the couple is saying farewell forever. The next couplet details the physical symptoms of the speaker's grief, such as tears and groans. The next couplet focuses on peoples' feelings of hope and misfortune, while the final one discusses the speaker's own hopelessness. This makes for a highly structured, predictable format. Meanwhile, the lines of the poem are end-stopped, meaning that the end of a phrase and the end of a line coincide, marked by punctuation (rather than a line break splitting a phrase into two). This further contributes to the sense of strict structure. Given the speaker's hopelessness and certainty that he'll never see his lover again, this structure makes sense. It mimics the speaker's own feelings of unalterable, unchanging, merciless grief.
