At first, the speaker begs not to see the other person’s grief. He asks that no one witness how the grieving heart still rocks like a temple shaken by long earthquakes. His own eyes, he feels, have already looked on corruption and evil and remained cold; a kind of moral decay has crawled into his mind where love and honour used to move. Seeing such honest sorrow feels dangerous because it might expose his numbness.
But the grief enters him anyway, and instead of destroying him it acts like a cleansing fire. It leaps through his unfaithful eyes and wakes the honour that had gone to sleep. By the end, remembering that grief has taken over his inner world completely: every thought belongs to the other person, and his mind becomes a quiet, luminous village, silent and attentive to their silence. The mood is intimate, sorrowful, and quietly reverent.