The poem imagines someone reading an old, outdated newspaper page and finding more in it than just old information. The speaker sees time itself in the yellowed paper: births, funerals, and the passing of ordinary lives. Children from the page have grown up, and the speaker pictures them as vague shadows that return in the imagination. Their return makes the speaker's own life look less like progress and more like a series of small failures, a gap between what we hoped for and what we got.
The mood is quiet, wistful, and a little uneasy. The speaker doesn't shout or mourn loudly; they notice. The line "Everything lost returning back again" suggests the past never really stays gone. By the end, the old page seems almost endless, as if its "prolonged obsolescence" reads on and on. The feeling is that yesterday's news isn't dead at all, and that it keeps pressing on the present.