In just three lines, the poem gives us a small, odd picture: an old interpreter lifting a rose to his ear, the way you would hold a seashell to hear the ocean. The title tells us the poem comes out of reading Neruda's "The Separate Rose," and the "sea-side" setting seems to carry some of that book's atmosphere into the image.
The interpreter is a telling choice. His job is to carry meaning from one language to another, so he treats the flower as something that speaks. He doesn't smell it or look at it. He listens. That suggests the poem is about how reading works: a good reader tries to hear what lies beneath the words, and translation becomes a kind of attentive listening.
The speaker never states a feeling, but the mood is quiet, gentle and a little wistful. The word "old" adds patience and a sense of long experience, and the ending leaves us hanging mid-gesture, as if we're still waiting to hear what the rose says.