Right from the opening, Shelley treats the past not as a distant memory but as something violently perished—drowned, frozen, dead forever. He addresses a “child,” perhaps a younger self or a beloved, and together they look back at what they’ve lost. Their old hopes have become spectres, wailing and ghastly, because they once lured those hopes to death on life's dark river. The image is chilling: what they eagerly pursued now haunts them as pale, pitiful ghosts.
In the second stanza, the river they once watched has rolled on, its waves never returning. While the stream of time flows away, the speaker and the child are left standing in a lone land, fixed like tombs that mark the memory of fading hopes and fears. The light of life has dimmed to a cold morning, and all that remains is a landscape of loss. The mood is deeply mournful and eerie—an intimate lament for the irrevocable past, where even memory feels like a monument to death.