How beautiful the yesterday that stood Over me like a rainbow! I am alone, The past is past. I see the future stretch All dark and barren as a rainy sea.

The speaker contrasts the consoling, luminous quality of memory (“yesterday…like a rainbow”) with the isolating finality of loss (“I am alone, / The past is past”). The rainbow image suggests a brief, refracted beauty that can appear after storm—an emblem of hope or reconciliation—yet it is explicitly behind and above the speaker, no longer inhabitable. The future, by contrast, is imagined as a featureless expanse (“stretch / All dark and barren as a rainy sea”), emphasizing uncertainty and emotional desolation. The passage dramatizes a Romantic-Victorian sensibility: intense inward feeling, nature as emotional analogue, and the painful awareness that time moves only forward.