The speaker addresses the reader directly and almost apologizes in advance: there is nothing here but a few words about a pair of dead pigeons. Readers are told to move on, yet the poem keeps asking them to stay a moment longer. It asks for one brief thought about how beauty can linger even in death, and about how every one of us will someday part ways with the people and things we love.
The pigeons are remembered alive, feeding, cooing under a roof, and rising into a sky as blue as their wings. The poem seems to treat them as small companions rather than mere birds. The closing image is gentle and tender: the speaker steps aside and lays the memories down by the side of the road, as if burying them there.
The mood is soft, resigned and sad, but never melodramatic. The line about ending "not with a bang, but with a whimper" suggests that death is quiet and ordinary, and that is exactly why the speaker wants it noticed.