After a long emotional winter, the speaker and his beloved realize that love has slipped away so gradually they mistook its stillness for death. The opening lines describe a dim, sunless inner world, then shift to a tense, almost frightening moment: the beloved, like Psyche bending over the hidden Cupid with her lamp, dares to look closely at what they thought was a corpse. The speaker feels dread and fragile hope at once—he has quietly accepted loss, but she refuses to let it stay unexamined. Her trembling courage brings love back to life. The mood moves from quiet numbness through dread to sudden, liquid brightness. The final lines return to the image of hearts empty of the sun, but now that emptiness is filled with something sky-distilled—a fresh, almost sacred joy. It is a poem about how love can survive its own apparent end and wake again through a moment of brave, tender attention.
The Return I — Summary
Now into hearts long empty of the sun The morning comes again with golden light And all the shades of the half-dusk are done And all the crevices are suddenly bright. So gradually had love lain down to sleep, We knew it not ; but when we saw his head Pillowed and sunken in a trance so deep We whispered shuddering that he was dead. Then you like Psyche took the light and leant Over the monster lying in his place, Daring, despairing, trembling as you bent . . . But love raised up his new-awakening face And into our hearts long empty of the sun We felt the sky-distilled bright liquor run.