The poem is a sonnet, rhyming abab-cdcd-efef-gg in three quatrains and a rhyming couplet. The poem's stanzas also are rhetorical units that first state the speaker's problem in the first quatrain, explore its probable causes in the second and third quatrains, and appear to solve the problem in the couplet. Enjambment occurs within stanzas but not between stanzas.
Quatrain 1: The poem's speaker addresses someone he (?) once believed was a friend or lover but who now has rejected him. The second-person familiar (thy/thou) indicates the relationship was intimate, either lovers or friends, parent to child, or master to servant. The speaker states that the addressee is in some way "worth more" than he is, and that this higher value warrants his release from the speaker's limited claims of attachment.
Quatrain 2: The speaker questions how he came to "hold" or possess the affections of the addressee, implying that the addressee made a gift of those affections which the speaker did not deserve.
Quatrain 3: The speaker says that the gift's return to the giver (because of some fault in the speaker) may be due to the giver's underestimation of his "worth," or mistaking the speaker's worthiness, a mistake now remedied by the gift's return.
Couplet: The speaker metaphorically compares his having the giver's affections to dreaming he was a king, but waking to find himself a commoner.