The speaker describes a dream in which someone stands at the far end of a long balcony. He wants to move closer, but the distance keeps growing instead. He can see small, vivid details: the end of a long cloth fluttering, wind ruffling her hair, a hand resting on a column. She looks like a statue, still and strangely beautiful, almost unreal.
The poem moves from longing to loss. As the speaker sinks into darkness, the darkness swallows the figure too, and he hears a dark ocean roaring. The opening line, where he says he will not go back to that balcony, suggests the dream hurts enough that he wants to avoid it, though the poem doesn't tell us who the person is. The mood is dreamlike, wistful and uneasy. The repeated "I saw..." feels like helpless watching, and the stretching distance makes the longing feel impossible to satisfy.