The poem opens by immediately establishing the setting and the context: “At night the dead come down to the river to drink” (Line 1). This makes the poem’s setting an objective time—night—and a mythological location: a river accessible to these departed souls. This is most likely an allusion to a mythic river of the afterlife, such as the Rivers Styx and Lethe from Greek mythology (See: Background).

Although the exact nature of the river isn’t specified, the moment portrays the dead taking action toward a goal, a communal act in which the dead are coming together, drawn from their circumstance toward the living. The river represents a literal and figurative threshold between the afterlife and the lives these people have lost. The poem then introduces the first-person plural speaker’s collective “us” (Line 3). The speaker is not part of the dead, but an observer—possibly the bereaved, or living humanity as a whole. In this moment, the dead experience a complex transformation, in which they leave behind the dreams and hopes for the future that they had about the speaker when alive (“They unburden themselves of their fears, / their worries for us” [Lines 2-3], and instead begin to interact only with past memories, taking out “the old photographs” [Line 3]).

The dead can still reach the living, however. They “pat the lines in our hands” (Line 4), but this physical contact is no longer a gesture of affection; rather, the dead predict our futures. They are either imbued with supernatural abilities or have become hokey charlatans—the speaker’s description of these futures as “cracked and yellow” (Line 5) points to the second interpretation. Because the dead have let their “worries for us” (Line 3), their fortunetelling is no longer personal or empathetic—it is instead permeated with decay and age.

The dead are also able to cross the boundary that the river seems to symbolize. The poem’s setting changes as the dead “find their way to our houses” (Line 6). We are no longer in the world of the mythological or allegorical; instead, the new  setting features the recognizable architectural elements of a family home: a door, a flight of stairs (to “go up” [Line 7]), and an attic filled with forgotten or discarded things.

Here, the poem introduces a twist. Although readers expect that the visiting dead enter the speaker’s houses to reconnect with the living, this is not the case. Rather, the dead are there to relive their own past lives in a self-centered orgy of memory. They rediscover letters they sent but are uninterested in responses. They are “insatiable / for signs of their love” (Lines 8-9), but they do not care to transmit this love to the bereaved. The word “insatiable” (Line 8) is key, as it highlights the hunger the dead have for the lives they lost. It is not the love of others that they need, but the love they were once capable of—the thing that made them feel alive. Even though the dead can leave the river, they cannot escape their new enclosed existence: “They tell each other stories” (Line 10) rather than tell the stories to those they’ve left behind, trying to recapture the lost sensation of love but only having access to it through memory. They can only communicate in a thoughtless way that ignores the presence of the living: “They make so much noise / they wake us” (Lines 11-12).

After spending the body of the poem examining the dead, the speaker closes by returning to their own experience: “they wake us” (Line 12). This brings them back to the memory of their childhood, in which the lost loved ones were an ever-present force of light and life. The reference to time, action, and place—“drinking all night in the kitchen” (Line 14)—parallels the opening line and gives the poem a sense of balance and completion.