Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
The poetic voice expresses here a certain dissatisfaction with the deromanticization of nature that the emergence of natural sciences in the early 19th century has brought with it. Science and its significance for the arts is something that would concern Poe throughout his life and work, for example in “Mesmeric Revelation” (1844) “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845), “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1845), and his magnum opus,  Eureka  (1848). 
 The second line may have been influenced by a line in William Blake’s  “The Mental Traveller”: 
 For the eye altering alters all…
Sonnet—To Science