Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View
The poem is told from a third-person perspective; the speaker never appears as a character in the poem.
Form and Meter
The poem is composed of three quatrains with an ABAB rhyme scheme.
Metaphors and Similes
The speaker compares the woman's lost allure to a wilted flower in the line "Time has turned the bloom to gray."
Alliteration and Assonance
There is alliteration in the F sounds of the line "Swiftly flew the fingers fine." There is assonance in the E sounds of the line "Dearest, ever deem me true."
Irony
The quoted line of the love letter is ironic because the woman loses both things she expects to hold onto for "ever."
Genre
Victorian poetry
Setting
Unspecified location; the poem ends with a description of letter writing which likely occurs at a desk
Tone
Tragic, regretful
Protagonist and Antagonist
The protagonist of the poem is an unnamed woman. The antagonist is time and neglect.
Major Conflict
The main conflict of the poem is the woman's loss of her beauty and happiness as a result of years of loneliness.
Climax
The climax of the poem occurs in the last line when the source of the woman's sadness, a broken love affair, is partially revealed.
Foreshadowing
The first line foreshadows the fact that the woman has lost something.
Understatement
N/A
Allusions
N/A
Metonymy and Synecdoche
N/A
Personification
N/A
Hyperbole
The line "Time has turned the bloom to gray" is a hyperbolic description of the woman's diminished physical appearance.
Onomatopoeia
N/A
