Re-Analysis of "The Iron Gate" by Oliver Wendell Holmes

Original Analysis here: https://ddcpoetry.blogspot.com/2013/02/analysis-of-iron-gate-by-oliver-wendell.html

I have a hard time analyzing long poems.  For this poem, I know I'm self-conscious about it as I wrote about it.  After re-reading this poem a couple of times trying to figure out what to write about it, I'm still a bit lost.  But what I know is the form is in quatrains with an abab cdcd type of rhyme scheme.  Most of the lines are end-stopped so I get a sense of a contained narrative with the poem.

I'm unsure of the narrative.  The speaker asks where "this patriarch" is and defines this patriarch familiarly, "Old age, the graybeard! Well, indeed, I know him -- / Shrunk, tottering, bent, of aches and ills the prey;" and after such physical description of this being, the speaker admits, "Yes, long, indeed, I've known him at a distance, / And now my lifted-door latch shows him here;"

Then the poem goes philosophical the next couple of stanzas.  "Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers"  so when the stanza of the speaker's intentions come, I get back into the poem

I come not here your morning hour to sadden,
A limping pilgrim, leaning on his staff,--
I, who have never deemed it sin to gladden
This vale of sorrows with a wholesome laugh.

2012 me thought this was a "douche stanza."  I think it's because of the idea of a "wholesome laugh" being straightforward about what is going on.  But what is going on?  Sure the speaker takes this patriarch beyond the iron gate and there's many stanzas that state their goodbyes to the audience: "These feebler pulses bid me leave to others / The tasks once welcome; evening asks for peace." and "In simplest phrase-- these traitorous eyes are tearful-- / Thanks, Brothers, Sisters,--Children,--and farewell!"   Farewell to the beyond, I think.

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I was looking up when this poem was written and published -- 1879 which was fifteen years before his death in 1894. But I took a look at his bio for the first time:

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

And I feel that his time as doctor, lecturer, and dean informs how this poem appears as someone outside of death talks about death.  Someone who has taken those to death and has to deal with that.  

In the bio of him, it states, "Holmes was a brilliant and innovative doctor who was well known for his witty lectures at Harvard."  In this poem, there isn't a need to be clear in passing information, but openly shows the struggle with happens beyond:

So when the iron portal shuts behind us,
And life forgets us in its noise and whirl,
Visions that shunned the glaring noonday find us,
And glimmering starlight shows the gates of pearl.