The speaker describes cities that rise out of dreams, glowing and drifting like a swarm of lanterns. These places are strange and a little self-enclosed: they are compared to snakes swallowing their tails, entering by their own back gates, and "holding mute communication." Nature has taken over. Rainforest shades the squares, gibbons live in government offices, and nightingales nest in palaces. It is beautiful, but also oddly lonely, since "nowhere is there to hide and listen."
In the second stanza the speaker steps inside this world. He ties ribbons of "speech" into girls' hair, which seems to be a picture of the poem itself, and he keeps company with sad saints who gather endangered or vanished species. Memory and dream blend together, and the speaker imagines meadows spreading across London. The mood is dreamy, tender and slightly melancholy. The final line leaves us with a place that is vivid yet belongs to nobody real, which suggests both the freedom and the emptiness of imagination.