"I visited the place where we last met."
The is the opening line of the poem. It immediately establishes a melancholic tone of recollection. It is immediately clear that this is going to be a poem about a relationship that is now over. It is not made clear whether that end resulted from death or choice, nor, for that matter, what was the nature of the relationship. The opening line efficiently creates a broad outline that serves as foreshadowing, but without implicating any specific expectations of what is to come.
"The thoughtless birds that shook out of the trees, / Singing an ecstasy I could not share"
The speaker declares the birds to be thoughtless because they are chirping happily at this place. This stands in direct contradiction to the speaker's sadness. The mood of the poem is elegiac. This visit to the place of the last meeting has filled the speaker not with the happiness of recollecting good times. A mournful sense of loss overwhelms the poem. The ecstatic singing of the birds cannot possibly be shared even though the place is exactly the same as it ever was.
"It was because the place was just the same / That made your absence seem a savage force"
In these opening lines of the final verse, the speaker confirms that it is precisely because nothing has changed in the place that this sense of loss is so overwhelming. It is a cry for understanding how the world itself cannot have changed at all, but the emotions it stimulates within a person can actually be completely different. The changes actually have taken place within the outside world, but it is only manifested inside. The quote also underlines the ironic dimension of the poetry. It is the memory of how this place stimulated happy feelings that is directly responsible for the sadness being felt upon return.
