The speaker is obsessed with a woman of overwhelming beauty — so striking that other women stop looking at themselves when she passes. She appears like a ghostly figure on a moonlit moor, leading a once-proud poet away from everything he knows. Even strangers at a train station feel a sharp, inexplicable loss if they glimpse her or just miss her. For the speaker, her absence carves a deeper hollow than anyone else’s presence ever could, no matter how bright or dark life becomes.
Then comes the quiet shock: he has never seen her. He has no proof she exists. All he knows is that she is not here, only that she might have been. The final lines tremble with possibility — perhaps he alone is meant to kiss her, perhaps she is searching for him — before the poem lets the hope collapse: she may not exist at all. The mood is suspended and aching, caught between a longing so specific it feels real and the haunting thought that the beloved is nothing but a shape his own desire has made.