The theme of change is pervasive in the poem. This is to be expected since the speaker is returning to a place he used to know intimately but has not visited in many years. The very first line announces that everything man-made in this small area of the countryside has changed with the passing of the years: “Nothing keeps the same” (Line 10). The haunted house on the street is no more to be seen; a tavern no longer has a sign indicating the former owner’s name. The girl the narrator remembers who would unmoor their skiff when they took it out on the river is no longer to be seen (Lines 121-23). Only the “dreaming spires” (Line 19) of Oxford seem to be unchanged.

Much of the natural scenery, however, remains the same, though change in nature is expressed through the passage of the seasons. The seasons come and go with their usual regularity, and the poem contains descriptions of winter, spring, and midsummer that convey this salient fact. There is a significant difference, however, between change in nature and change in the human world: The passage of the seasons is cyclic, but human change is not. The narrator points this out in Stanzas 6 to 8: the cuckoo departs in late spring and will return when spring comes in the following year, but there can be no return for Thyrsis since he is dead and subject to the inevitable process of time: “For Time […] hath conquered thee!” (Line 80).