The speaker describes an unsettling encounter with a pair of “mad eyes”—glazed, deep, and cutting. Those eyes don’t just look; they “slice slowly” and “dissect” every movement, so the person being watched feels exposed, almost taken apart. There’s a cold, clinical intensity to the gaze, and the speaker seems both transfixed and disturbed by it.
Then the poem shifts inward. The speaker is “lost in phosphorescent seas,” waters that glow strangely and whose depths “we have long since forgotten.” That image suggests a submerged, dreamlike state: a mind drifting through memories or feelings that lie far below ordinary awareness. The overall mood is eerie and hypnotic—part menace, part trance—as if madness itself is staring and pulling the speaker under.