The speaker is looking back on a relationship that has ended, speaking directly to the person he loved. He wishes he could have held her entirely within himself, but now memory keeps retracing their shared journey up to the moment they separated. There is tenderness here, but also painful regret: he confesses he wishes he had never seen some of the different sides of her, and those images still appear and disappear, leaving him crying in between. By the end, he is rocking alone at night, no longer able to hope that he can heal her suffering or repay her years of longing and despair. The mood is intimate and mournful, full of guilt, exhaustion, and the sense that a part of him has gone numb or died with the relationship. It feels like a late-night confession, quiet and heavy, as if the speaker is alone with memories he cannot undo.
The End — Summary
If I could have put you in my heart, If but I could have wrapped you in myself, How glad I should have been! And now the chart Of memory unrolls again to me The course of our journey here, before we had to part.
And oh, that you had never, never been Some of your selves, my love, that some Of your several faces I had never seen! And still they come before me, and they go, And I cry aloud in the moments that intervene.
And oh, my love, as I rock for you to-night, And have not any longer any hope To heal the suffering, or make requite For all your life of asking and despair, I own that some of me is dead to-night.