The speaker is a settler, someone who has arrived in a place and made it home, and who is now asking uncomfortable questions about that. The poem opens with a hypothetical: if this place had no hell, no faith, no truth, no love, would any of it matter? Would the speaker have taken these things so seriously? It reads like someone testing the foundations of their own beliefs and finding them shaky.
The second stanza turns to doubt. "How much of this is true" could refer to the place itself or to the stories told about it. The images are oddly mixed: a "marginal swan," "dancing girls," and a "open road of a body." They suggest beauty, desire, and a landscape imagined as something to be travelled or taken. The final question is the sharpest. Is any of this enough to earn the name "conquerors"? The mood is uneasy and self-questioning. The speaker seems unsure, perhaps guilty, and the poem ends without an answer, leaving the doubt hanging.