Pickering paints a derelict harbour as a strange, ghostly place where nothing works as it should. The "club without members" that opens at night suggests a gathering with nobody in it, and the damp wharfs, broken ships and rat-like seamen show a place where human life has decayed. The speaker seems to look on with a cold, unsettled fascination rather than plain sadness.
The most striking image is the faces hanging from the gantries: masks of laughter and weeping, emotions stripped from the people who once felt them and left dangling like empty costumes. Then the crane hooks "dangle darkness," and silence becomes a gang plotting to slip in through the water. What they want are "lost documents of departure," which the poem seems to treat as records of journeys, leavings and lost chances. The mood is eerie, bleak and watchful, as though the harbour itself were holding memories it cannot quite let go of.