Nobody in "Elegy 2" says that someone has died, and nobody says "I grieve." The speaker never appears at all: there is no "I" anywhere in these eight short lines. What we get instead is a leaf, a few pairs of opposites, and one quiet sentence at the end that changes how everything before it reads. The central idea is that loss is a suspension, a long falling that never quite lands, and that the person mourned has become that falling.
The poem moves in three steps, and each step narrows the focus. The first stanza stays outdoors with weather and seasons: "between rain and snow / between summer and winter." The second turns abstract, to place and time: "between here and there / between now and then." The last two lines are the most intimate, with a single "you." So the poem travels from the sky, to the coordinates of existence, to one person, and the refrain "a lone leaf was falling" sits between the stages like a hinge.
The word "between" opens four lines in a row, almost like a drumbeat, and every time it points to a gap rather than a place. Rain mixed with snow is sleet, neither one thing nor the other. Autumn, the season when leaves fall, is never named. It exists only as the space left between "summer" and "winter," so the leaf seems to fall through an absence. The second pair of lines uses phrases so ordinary that we normally skim over them: "here and there," "now and then." Placed after the weather images, they suddenly carry more weight. Judging by the title, "there" may hint at wherever the dead have gone, and "then" at a past the speaker cannot leave. The mourner may be caught in between, just as the leaf is.
The refrain is the poem's most careful piece of craft. It repeats word for word, yet it reads differently the second time, because the "betweens" before it have grown from weather into existence itself. The verb matters too. "Was falling" is past tense, but the progressive form describes an action still in progress. We watch the leaf fall and never see it land. The poem has no punctuation and no capital letters, so even the grammar does not come to rest. There is no full stop to mark an ending, which suits a grief that has none.
Then comes the turn: "it was you / alone." Until now the leaf was just a leaf, and in two lines it becomes a person. The reader has to go back and reread, and the earlier images change as they do. "Lone" in the refrain and "alone" in the last line echo each other, and the break after "you" leaves "alone" sitting by itself on the final line, as isolated as the thing it describes. The sound adds to this. There is no rhyme, but the long "o" of "snow" in the first line comes back in "lone" and "alone," so the cold of the opening seems to return in the final word. Repetition does the job that rhyme usually does, tying the poem together and making it feel like something being said over and over in the mind.
The past tense of "it was you" is quietly painful as well. It suggests that the speaker has only now recognised what they were watching, or can only look back at it. Either way, the realisation arrives in the plainest possible words.
The poem's significance lies in this restraint. An elegy might be expected to lament loudly or to praise the dead at length, but this one trusts an image and lets the reader do the emotional work. It never explains who "you" is, and that gap is what makes it easy to bring our own losses to it. The numeral in the title suggests it may belong to a sequence of elegies, though the poem itself gives no further hint. Even alone, it manages something difficult: it makes the strange, formless feeling of grief, of being neither here nor there, neither now nor then, into something as small and visible as a leaf coming down.