The hated way I followed Has made me like the lion in a cage That when I bring my children To the zoo, I am likely to avoid.
Chestnuts bloom there, Subdued cries, Shells underfoot, Gloriette In desuetude, run as a showpiece.
I am forever a stage, Condition under which I live.
The speaker feels trapped, and the poem shows it through an odd little scene at a zoo. He compares himself to a caged lion, shaped by "the hated way I followed," a path he seems to resent but could not escape. The strange detail is that he avoids that lion when he takes his children to the zoo. Seeing his own condition in the animal is clearly too uncomfortable.
The second stanza sketches the place itself: blooming chestnuts, muffled cries, shells crunching underfoot, and the Gloriette, a grand structure that has fallen into neglect but is still shown off as an attraction. Whatever it once meant, it is now just displayed.
The last two lines turn inward. "I am forever a stage," he says, as if his life is something performed or watched, a set conditions have built around him. The mood is quiet and weary, with a dry, resigned kind of sadness running under the pleasant spring surface.