In this poem, the narrator stumbles across a painfully bereaved lover who was taken away from the love of his life in a fateful manner. The lover explains as they walk along in the woods that he finally found his soulmate, and although they had some time together, memories that will haunt him for the rest of his life, for some reason the gods deigned to take her away from him, and he cannot imagine what kind of fate would justify such suffering as he now endures. He is broken and confused, and he is struggling with the weight of hopelessness; he is confident he will never see her again.
As they walk along, the evening comes on, and they stop at a fountain to lay down and sleep. This happens to be the mythic Fountain of Love, and the poet describes what happens next: as they sleep, the Greek god Morpheus arrives in the lover’s sleep. He is the god of dreaming and visions, and he has come to answer the lover’s agonized questions with a vision of love. He links the dream with the dream of the lost woman, the lover’s beloved, and for a small while, the two talk and are reunited. Then, the dream passes away.
In the aftermath, the man finds that he is permanently changed by the vision. He begins to wonder about reality, understanding the supernatural dream as a revelation from the gods about the truth of reality. He believes that he and his soulmate are perfectly united, which means that his waking consciousness, with its painful fate and its separation, must be an illusion. He arrives at the belief that perhaps in death, he will be permanently reunited with his soul mate, making this difficult time nothing but a drama, designed to create deep longing between them that will mean absolute ecstasy when they are reunited in heaven.
