The title suggests a church service, and the poem opens inside one: an organ, pictured oddly as "a fat nurse." The comparison is both comic and tender. The organ is round, bustling, and caring, tending to the congregation the way a nurse tends the sick. It plays "for music" but also "for the undergrowth called time," a striking phrase that makes time feel like tangled, overgrown ground where things get lost or hidden.
Then the tone shifts. The speaker says he faces down "the grave," which comes toward him "like a memory / utterly false." That image is hard to pin down. Perhaps death seems to arrive as something already known, yet it can't truly be remembered, since no one has been there. The speaker doesn't flinch, though. He stands and looks. The mood is quiet, wry, and a little eerie: humor and dread sit side by side, and the music gives him something to hold onto while he confronts mortality.