These lines picture pain as a carved tomb, its surface covered with faint images of former loves frozen mid-embrace. Because the outlines are so slight, they almost dissolve into a single muted color of regret, lit from within by old, exhausted weeping. There is a sense that these past attachments are still present but no longer sharp; they have become part of the speaker’s emotional landscape.
Then the poem turns to the present: “Our lips cling,” and breath becomes a hand with the gentleness of summer rain. That touch is what finally blends the frozen figures on the sarcophagus. The speaker seems to feel that intimacy now can soften and blur the hard edges of past pain, wrapping old grief in tenderness rather than erasing it. The mood is quiet, mournful, and strangely warm.