The poem begins with a promise that already feels doomed: "In my dream / I shall not go to that long balcony / again..." The speaker swears off a place, yet the vow is made inside the dream, and the ellipsis leaves it hanging. He then goes on to describe the balcony in vivid detail. The title repeats the vow, but the poem itself is a return. That tension between resolving to leave and being unable to is what drives it. The text never says who "you" is or why the balcony matters, and that silence helps. The poem works as a record of longing without a story attached.
The middle stanza shows how dreams bend space. The speaker sees someone at "the far end" and wants to "come near," but "distance gradually increased." The balcony stretches as he approaches, the way a corridor does in a nightmare. The word "long" appears in "long balcony" and again in "long cloth," so the length of the place and the length of the fabric seem to echo each other. The poem also moves between tenses. "You stood" is past, "I desire" is present, and "increased" is past again. That wobble suits a dream, where something that already happened still feels as if it is happening.
The imagery is built on a contrast between motion and stillness. The end of the cloth flutters, and the air ruffles the hair. The beloved is touched by wind in a way the speaker cannot be, since the air gets close and he does not. Then the figure stands with a hand on a column, "like an astonishing statue." A statue is fixed and made of stone, and it can be admired but not reached. "Astonishing" is an unusual choice. We might expect "astonished," but the word seems to describe the effect on the watcher, who is stunned into helplessness. The syntax in this line is also a little rough ("Keep your hand on a column you stood"). Whether or not that was intended, the clumsiness fits a speaker who is losing control of his own sentences.
The repeated "I saw" does a lot of work. It appears three times, and the last one is left unfinished: "I saw..." The speaker is only a witness, and by the end even that role gives out, as if there is too much to see or he can no longer go on seeing. This sets up the final stanza, where sight gives way to darkness.
"Gradually" is the poem's most important word. It appears in the distance growing, in the speaker sinking, and in the darkness devouring the figure, and "slowly" adds a fourth note of the same kind. Nothing happens suddenly. The loss is a slow tide that cannot be argued with. In the last stanza the pronouns trade places in an interesting way. The speaker sinks in darkness, and then the darkness "devours" the other person as well. The loss is shared, and neither of them escapes.
The final image is a sound, not a sight: "the roaring of Dark Ocean." The capital letters turn a plain phrase into something close to a proper name, a vast and unnamed force. An ocean is a surprise on a balcony, but dreams do not keep to realistic geography. Judging by the imagery, the ocean could stand for oblivion, grief, or the unconscious, though the poem never says which. Its refusal to explain makes the ending stronger, because the roar is all that is left once sight has gone.
Formally, the poem is free verse. It has no rhyme and its lines are uneven, some only a few words long and others stretching out. The ellipses at the start, in the middle and at the very end act like held breaths. The vocabulary is plain, and the poem relies on a few repeated words, a couple of strong images, and the movement from seeing to hearing.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it gets the feeling of a recurring dream so exactly. The speaker resolves never to return, and the resolve itself shows that he will. For a school reader, the lesson is how much a short poem can do when it trusts repetition and an unexplained setting. We never learn the full story, but we feel the distance growing.