The poem follows a man hollowed out by the loss of a woman. The opening stanza is almost violent: someone is told to drain him of his "dulled gold" and pull the voice from his lips, until he groans in a room that grows cold. After that, the poem turns to what he misses. It names her hair and their kisses, then says his longing made him sad enough to harm himself. The word "grotesque" suggests he feels ashamed of what he did.
The last two stanzas shift to a harsher, almost chanting voice. The speaker tells her to leave, tells him to stand rooted like a tree and scream into the abyss. But the tree image turns dark: branches rot, roots are eaten, and he is caught in the ground. The mood is bleak and bitter. Grief here doesn't heal him. It traps him, and the closing line says she has beaten him. The title hints that he believed the "game" was his.