The poem opens on a quiet winter landscape: a moon rising over a world gone white, with stags and deer huddled together in a sheltered nook of the mountain. Everything is hushed and slow. The air is described as "chill gauze," as if the whole scene were wrapped in thin, pale fabric.
Then the speaker steps into the picture. His white brows are compared to nameless birds flying over dim reflections, which suggests he is old, as the title says, and perhaps looking back across his life. The image is gentle rather than sad, as though age has become part of the snowy scenery.
The final lines turn personal. Someone's memory fills the air "like the incense of a dream," so the absent person seems to drift through the cold landscape, soft and half real. The mood is calm, wistful, and tender. The speaker's loneliness is there, but it is wrapped in beauty and peace rather than pain.