In the quiet of a starlit countryside, the speaker remembers a walk taken with a companion a year before through a jangling, crowded city. They moved through avenues of light and narrow tangled streets, detached from the foreign crowds but intensely alive. The memory turns on a shabby sign—“The India Wharf”—where they paused and turned back. Yet the speaker felt the two could have boarded a ship and sailed across bright green seas to dreaming cities and palaces of ivory and scarlet. That feeling of being “sure and elated” was, the speaker says, the companion’s gift.
The mood is tender and nostalgic. The present sleeping fields make the remembered city feel bright and thrilling, and the wharf becomes a symbol of possibility never taken. The speaker treasures the memory less for the place than for the rare feeling of being fully alive and beyond the reach of death and sorrow.