The opening lines of the poem
“I have been here before
But when or how I cannot tell”
have allowed the poem to become open to a number of possible interpretation. What can cause a person to feel that sense of memory, but not the details? Many conclude from the opening that the speaker is describing that strange and as-yet-unexplained experience known as déjà vu. The lines which immediately follow certainly contribute to this interpretation as memory of the place becomes more tactile and specific with the speaker recalling the smell of grass, lights on a shore and a sound vaguely characterized as sounding like a sigh.
The second stanza, however, seems out of place with the description of a moment of déjà vu. We learn now that the speaker is addressing someone because now he claims that an unidentified “you” has been “his” before. At this point the poem seems to stop completely beyond the boundaries of that weird familiar/unfamiliar sensation of déjà vu with the speaker admitting that he cannot recall when the other person and he were together. The next line not only seems to be open to interpretation, but wild misinterpretation. One or the other must be wrong, but which:
“But just when at that swallow’s soar”
Since the bird called the swallow is one of the most common species of birds to be found in poetry, some read into this line the image of bird in flight. And yet the very next line presents the image of the other person’s neck turning at which point the veil clouding the speaker’s memory instantly falls away and the memory of having been here before comes rushing back full formed. The immediately connection of a swallow taking place in the throat and a neck turning seems to indicate quite strongly then that image here has nothing to do with birds and everything to do with a moment in time in which the focus of attention is another person.
The third stanza opens by asking if the present has been lived before in the past which leads the speaker to was philosophically upon the ability of love to transcend the flight of time. But then the speaker makes a very specific reference to what has happened during the flight of that time: the person he is addressing has died. Or, at least, that seems the most obvious interpretation as the poem end with the speaker musing that perhaps this transcendental quality of love can bring on at any time moments like that which he has just experienced—moments of memories half-forgotten—which restore the most profound feelings once felt deeply whether one is currently feeling the lightness of happiness or the darkness of despondency.
