A sudden memory cuts through the speaker like a small fire or a fluttering wing. Someone speaks the name of a person who is gone, and at once the past feels alive again—so alive that she asks, “What, can a dead bird sing?” The voice sounds exactly the same, bringing back the “heart’s wild Spring,” a time of passion and renewal. But memory also brings pain, because the relationship did not simply end; it slowly decayed. The speaker wonders which of them was at fault, and the poem closes on a note of exhausted grief: “God, the slow withering!”
The repeated lines work like an echo, or a haunted thought that keeps circling back, just as memory does. The mood is sorrowful and intimate, full of longing, regret, and the ache of something lost that still flutters weakly in the present.