The speaker spends a morning lost inside his own head, without a compass, and then turns outward to face the world. The images are strange and dreamlike. He rides a "delicate stone horse," which sounds both heavy and fragile, and he looks at a crowd whose faces are also stone. Nobody seems alive or reachable, and the speaker seems to be both a traveler and a kind of statue himself.
The mood is weary and disillusioned. Hearing "lies enough to make any man sick" suggests he is tired of the dishonesty around him, and the poem's tone shifts from drifting to disgust. The last lines surprise us: a "pound of candles for God" is called the oddest present. Candles are what people light in prayer, so the gift feels almost absurd, like giving God something he already has, or something that only adds a small flame to a dark world. The ending is wry and a little sad, mixing doubt with a faint wish for some kind of light.