An unidentified narrator is speaking to another person who is presumed to be the person the speaker has been spending his life with as a romantic partner. He tells her that he wants to feel her hands on his eyes when he is dead. Those hands cast a metaphorical light and are a metaphorical sustenance and he wishes to feel the freshness of them just one more time before he passes. Her smooth hands become a metonym for her entire existence, which he believes changed the fate of his life for the better.
He tells her to go ahead and live a full life after he has died. He wants her to engage all her senses in the enjoyment of that life through metaphorical imagery. He wants her to hear the wind and smell the ocean and feel the sand beneath her feet on a beach they enjoyed together.
He temporarily dismisses poetic language to tell her in plainly that what he really wants is simply for her to get on with her life. Then the poetry returns as he compares the extent of his love for her with singing her praise above everything else. He calls her a flower and implores her to continue flowering the lives of those she meets.
The reason for this desire is explained in the final stanza when the speaker tells her why he wants to be only a shadow falling upon her hair and how his love can guide her through the rest of her life without him. In living fully without him after he has died everyone will see how much he loved her and how much she loves him still.
