"The Bay" begins by grounding the reader in its setting: a road by a bay, sometime in the past.
In lines 1-2, the speaker recalls that near this bay was "a lake of rushes" (tall grasses that often grow near water) where "we bathed at times and changed in the bamboos." These images suggest a serene, sheltered natural environment, a swimming spot that you'd have to know was there if you were to find it behind its screen of plants. The bay was a place cut off from the outside world, an escapist paradise.
That sense of a private paradise feels even stronger because of the speaker's use of a general "we"—a word that here suggests a group of people so familiar to the speaker that they don't even need to be introduced. Readers might guess that this "we" was a close-knit group of the speaker's friends or family members.
"Now," though, the speaker's happy memories of this time and these people seem far away. After those idyllic opening lines, the speaker juxtaposes the sheltered past with a disillusioned present:
Now it is rather to stand and say:
How many roads we take that lead to Nowhere,
The days of swimming in the bay, then, have given way to a new and sadder time. Instead of simply relishing pleasant memories of the past, the speaker looks on the same landscape from a different perspective, knowing that "many roads we take [...] lead to Nowhere." While the "road to the bay" in line 1 led to a fun, carefree environment, these more abstract "roads"—perhaps a metaphor for life choices—seem aimless. And fact that these roads lead to "Nowhere" (capitalized as if it were a real place name) suggests that the speaker feels dissatisfied with how life has turned out.
Note, too, how the speaker still uses the third-person plural "we" in line 4. This probably isn't the same group as the "we" in line 2; instead, it probably refers to people in general. The speaker implies that ending up on the road to "Nowhere" is just part of growing up, for everyone.
The speaker develops the idea of life's dead ends with an image of the road to the bay as an "alley overgrown." This image works as a literal description of the road, but also suggests that the path back to the innocent thrill of younger days is impassable now. The road is "overgrown"—and perhaps the speaker is, too! They've grown past their ability to take simple pleasure in the bay, or even to enjoy their memories of the bay. Whatever "meaning" was there has been replaced by a "loss."
Line 6 sums up what the speaker has lost: "that veritable garden where everything comes easy." Presenting a happy childhood as a garden, the poem quietly alludes to the story of the Garden of Eden. Like Eden, the speaker's youth was an innocent paradise, and like Eden, now it's gone for good.
This poem will tell its poignant story in 20 lines of unrhymed, unmetered free verse divided into three stanzas: two sestets (or six-line stanzas) and one octet (an eight-line stanza). This flexible, impressionistic form helps to make readers feel as if they're listening on the speaker's private, quiet thoughts.