The poet begins by highlighting the strangeness of finding Jewish graves in a seaport town. He maintains his surprise that the Jews are silent in their graves next to an ever turbulent sea.

Next, he highlights the dust-covered trees, which provide a canopy of shade over the graves. The Jews's long, mysterious "Exodus of death" ends here. As for the Jews, the poet is referring to those who fled the Catholic Portuguese Inquisition in the 17th century. Then, the Portuguese Inquisition targeted converted Jews who had supposedly betrayed the tenets of their adopted Christian faith.

The Jews fled to the Caribbean. In 1658, the first group of Jews arrived in Newport, Rhode Island, the setting of this poem. These Jewish pioneers were of Spanish and Portuguese descent. Upon hearing of religious toleration in the North American colonies, they made their way to New England shores.

Eventually, this first group of Jews built a Jewish cemetery in Newport in 1677. Two prominent Jews in the congregation, Moses Pacheco and Mordechai Campanal, purchased a lot for the cemetery. Today, the Touro Synagogue is located next to the cemetery; the synagogue is the oldest in America and a national historic site.

In the poem, the poet likens the tombstones in the cemetery to the tablets of Moses (the same ones which the 10 Commandments were inscribed upon). He also maintains that the names on the tombstones are strange-sounding: he sees "Alvares" and "Rivera" alongside "Abraham and Jacob of old times."

Next, the poet moves to discuss the finality of death, which leaves the synagogue empty. On Sabbaths, there is no sign of a rabbi preaching in the grand tradition of the Prophets, and no singing is heard in the congregation. However, the dead and their graves are sustained by an unseen hand (God).

The poet then moves to discuss how the Jewish graves came to be. As explained above, the first group of Jews who came to Newport was attracted by the religious toleration shown in the New England colonies.

The poet voices his admiration for how the Jews endured "merciless and blind" persecution with patience. They held fast, according to the tradition of the prophets and patriarchs. He uses the language of the Old Testament to describe their ordeal under the Portuguese Inquisition. Phrases like "unleavened bread," "bitter herbs of exile," and "marah of their tears" bring to mind the Hebrew exodus out of Egypt.

The poet maintains that the tombstones tell the story of a Hebrew book, which always "reverts" to the past. Thus, the entire cemetery holds the "Legend of the Dead."

The poem ends on a melancholy note, however. In the last lines, the poet laments that the "dead nations" will never rise again.