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]).