When then is lost, as time is by, we look upon the yearly wine to see our substance in the lees. Did tribe and purse most pleasing leave? To look for clear and faithful sense, that gives a bodied stance bouquet, then see the vat at mirror's face and find in it, the yearly pace.

The speaker frames time’s passing as a kind of annual vintage: when “then” is gone, we examine what remains—like wine sediment (“lees”)—to judge the substance of a year. The questions about “tribe and purse” suggest social belonging and material gain as tempting measures of success, but the poem pivots toward “clear and faithful sense,” implying that meaning, integrity, and honest perception are the truer tests. Images of bouquet, vat, and mirror propose that self-scrutiny can reveal the year’s “pace”: not just what happened, but how one moved through it. Overall, it reads as a reflective, moral inventory cast in winemaking metaphors.