Each year, when June arrives, the speaker is pulled back to a single night: the first of June, when he and a lover met in soft rain and walked through wet streets arm in arm, already aching with desire. He remembers the small, cheerful room they went to, the clean white bed, and how they lay together in the dark listening to rain while their bodies made their own music.
The memory is intensely physical and tender, but it is also gone. The speaker calls the love “fugitive and so complete” — it lasted only one night, yet it still possesses him. The mood is sensual and wistful, full of warmth and rain and the ache of something beautiful that cannot return.