The poem begins with a quiet, almost startling comparison: a woman is a shadow on the grass, cast by a star so ordinary it has a simple name. That star is presumably the sun, and the title borrows a term from visual art, where a figure only makes sense against its ground. Here the ground is enormous, so large that she cannot see herself in it.
From there the poem widens its view. Moss grows beneath grass, stars sit behind the sun, and even a pebble or a dead sparrow on the roadside casts its own shadow. Everything, small or broken, belongs to the same pattern. The speaker then asks why anyone should fear death "against this curve of space, this ground of time?" The question feels more like consolation than challenge.
The mood is calm and meditative, with a gentle sadness in the sparrow and the cold road. The final lines place her breath and the planets' shadows side by side, suggesting that a human life and a cosmic one are made of the same fleeting stuff.