The speaker sits in a rose garden, waiting, and time stops behaving normally. One day feels like two centuries: waking in the morning is the first, waking in the evening the second. Even the rain seems wrong, "no wetness in it." The speaker insists they never slept in between, yet admits that no one can really say what happened, which suggests a blurred, dreamlike state.
Against this vague waiting, the poem sets a small, precise image: a moth-child crawling up a twig, pausing over a thorn, swaying its head against a leaf. It doesn't know where its journey ends, and neither does the speaker. The old man in the story has reached home, but "the journey is not over," so arrival doesn't bring an answer. The mood is quiet, curious and a little uneasy. The speaker feels suspended, gently sorry for the creature, and unsure how to measure time or purpose, with the roses still unborn and the waiting unresolved.