‘O my cousin, shallow-hearted! O my Amy, mine no more!/O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren, barren shore!’ – Tennyson was criticised for an overuse of repetition early on in his career (in the Quarterly Review quoted above). Possibly, the speaker’s reaction is meant to sound rather excessive and ridiculous.

‘Falser than all fancy fathoms, falser than all songs have sung,’ – perhaps an excessive use of alliteration.

‘Puppet to a father's threat, and servile to a shrewish tongue!’ – The ‘shrewish tongue’ belongs to Amy’s mother. Her parents are not impressed with her suitor.

‘Is it well to wish thee happy?--having known me--to decline/On a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart than mine!’ – An indication that the speaker looks down on those without his range of sensibilities. Ironically, he criticises those who show more traditional forms of snobbery.

‘Yet it shall be; thou shalt lower to his level day by day,/What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay.’ – Amy’s husband will gradually bring her down to his level.

‘As the husband is, the wife is: thou art mated with a clown,’ – The word still preserved the sense of rustic idiot at this time.

‘He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force,’ – when the initial passion of the relationship is over.

‘Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.’ – i.e. as a possession only, and not as a particularly prized possession. Amy’s husband is being portrayed as a stereotypically stupid country gentleman.

‘He will answer to the purpose, easy things to understand—’ – Her husband’s conversation is not going to be intellectually challenging.

‘Better thou wert dead before me, tho' I slew thee with my hand!’ – implies the speaker, in his extremity of feeling, could actually become a murderer.

‘Better thou and I were lying, hidden from the heart's disgrace,’ – For Amy to have married him would have been a social disgrace. The speaker plays here with the idea of the disgrace of denying true love.