The poem opens on a small, sad image: a rose that has died in midsummer, when it should be thriving, because it was "married / to a stake," tied to the support meant to hold it up. The next stanza turns to some unnamed creature that sank "from want of spirit" and "died pretty." The tone is dry and a little mocking, as if beauty were a poor excuse for giving up.
Then the scene widens. Everyone is asleep, and the only thing stirring is the "ordinary violence" of a peak, which suggests the slow, indifferent force of the natural world. The last stanza surprises us with a turn toward hope, though a strange one: if we are eaten, we will live again. Death becomes a kind of recycling. Even a cat returns as itself, "circumspect and factious."
The mood is quiet, cryptic and darkly playful. The speaker seems less grieving than watchful, finding a bleak comfort in the idea that being consumed is also a way of continuing.