Lurking at the dark heart of this love sonnet is the inescapable absoluteness of death and the reality of mortality without the glittery and fetching promise of immortality. Thus, this poem, essentially a heartfelt plea from an anxious lover, is not about love at all; rather the poem is about that lover dying. More to the point, this is a poem not about how to die. Rather, the poem examines how to love and how to live, knowing death is real.

The circumstances of the speaker’s death are never made clear—for instance, what is the cause, how long do the lovers have—only that death is on the horizon, giving the sonnet its tragic urgency. Because the lovers are presumably young, living in happy anticipation of their life together to start, the terror of death introduced so prematurely gives the poem its dark feel. It is perhaps salient that at the time Rossetti composed the sonnet she was herself a teenager, not dying, and, given that she had just ended a short courtship, not even in love. The poem thus can seem more like a knotty word problem posed in a philosophy seminar than an example of introspective confessional verse: how would a young lover facing death say goodbye?