Bodenheim’s speaker looks back on a life spent wandering, when road-dust was his wine and even beech-trees seemed to bow beside him. In memory, his youth holds frail beauty: mornings, moonlight, and silent, statue-like maidens who bathed him in their stillness. But those images are already touched by loss—the moon is departing, the perfume is dead.
Now he walks on alone. The final lines are quietly sad and a little defiant: after watching many evenings pass, he dances briefly with the last faint moonlight, trying to persuade himself he is still young. The mood is wistful and elegiac, mixing nostalgia for a freer past with the loneliness of age.