Five short stanzas trace the slow erasure of a whole world: first the soil, then the rites, then the people, then the ships, until only the King and Queen remain. The opening phrase, “As they grew older,” quietly sets the poem’s subject as time itself. The land that once “grown wheat” washes downhill, and the river carries it into the sea. That first image of erosion becomes the poem’s model for every later loss. A priest in a horned mask turns into a bird; market people become clumps of weed; a wine galley sinks and is not fully recovered. Each stanza is a small, calm act of undoing, told in the same flat, declarative voice, as if decay were inevitable rather than tragic. By the end the King and Queen rule over “the dark nation / of thrones,” not a living kingdom but a silent one. The poem suggests that all the activity of a civilization—farming, worship, trade, salvage—is fragile, while power can petrify into stillness.
The poem does not use regular rhyme or meter. It moves through five-line stanzas and very short lines that stop and start, often spilling over each other. Enjambment enacts the process of washing away: in the first stanza the line break after “wheat” lets the phrase slide into “washed down the hill,” and the break at “the river” makes the water feel like the next stage of the same motion. There is no chime of end-rhyme, but the piece is held together by recurrence. The bare hill appears in the first and third stanzas, the river in the first and last, and the products of a living world—wheat, meat, wine—are named only to be lost. The final line is especially slowed by a break after “As slowly,” so the reader feels the gradual movement before the rulers’ stillness arrives.
The imagery is built from transformation and disappearance. Wheat, meat, and wine are products of earth, altar, and trade, and all of them vanish or sink. The priest’s horned mask gives him an older, nonhuman power, and his flight among the mountains returns him to nature, away from the altar. The people who once bowed until their heads touched the ground become weeds in gutters, so devotion turns into valueless wild growth on a bare hill. The galley carrying wine sinks in the harbour, while the barge of hooks “smoked and heaved,” one of the few struggling, active movements in the poem, yet it only tries to raise what is already lost. Even the salvage is an image of failure.
The phrase “dark nation / of thrones” is the poem’s sharpest turn. Thrones are seats of authority, empty without the bodies that fill them, so a nation of thrones is a nation of vacant power. The word “dark” is deliberately ambiguous: it can mean shadowy, hidden, or funereal. The King and Queen do not die, flee, or regain their kingdom; they simply become still, “as slowly / as a river builds a delta.” That simile is crucial because a river builds a delta by depositing what it has carried—slow accumulation rather than sudden catastrophe. The same river that earlier carried the land into the sea now becomes the measure of royal fixity. Destruction and creation are shown as two sides of one slow process, and the rulers are left like geological forms rather than living people.
What makes the poem significant is its compression and its reversal. It shrinks the collapse of an entire civilization into twenty-five short lines, but it never moralizes or names a particular place. The priest-bird and the weed-people feel like images from fable or dream, so the kingdom could be any kingdom, and the fall could be any fall. Usually a story about a king and queen ends with restoration, death, or conquest; here the rulers outlive their world only as hollow symbols. Their power remains, but its human content is gone. The calm tone makes the loss feel natural, even strangely beautiful, and the final image is not an explosion of grief but an eerie quiet. That quiet is what remains after the markets, altars, and ships have disappeared: a man and a woman ruling over empty thrones.