The poem's title helps to set up its context: the speaker has returned home after time away. The poem's opening lines then reveal that this home looks and feels quite different to the speaker.
Now, the "present reign[s] supreme": the speaker personifies the present as a kind of all-powerful ruler lording over the past. This emphasizes that the past is, well, the past—gone for good, firmly under the thumb of the present.
The speaker expands on this image with a simile comparing the way the present rules over the past to "the shallow floods over the gutters." Gutters are water drainage systems; the present here is like water overflowing out of those gutters and then spreading "[o]ver the raw paths" the speaker once walked along. In other words, the present is like a layer of water that covers up the past.
And notice how the poem's enjambment mirrors that flooding, the text spilling over from one line to the next:
Like the shallow floods over the gutters
Over the raw paths where we had been,
The ambiguous phrase "raw paths" might imply that the speaker's home was previously rough or unshapen—or, perhaps, a place of raw potential. Now, however, that potential is out of rich, hidden under the water of the present. The use of the word "we" also reveals that the speaker isn't alone in this homecoming: there are others returning with the speaker (perhaps other members of the speaker's generation who left to pursue opportunities elsewhere).
"The house with the shutters," meanwhile, suggests that this is a specific place that the speaker used to see along those paths: it's not just any house with shutters, but "the" house. It's unclear if that flooding water also covers up that house or just the path that leads to it. Either way, the poem implies that the speaker can't easily reach it anymore. The mention of shutters might also subtly suggest a kind of closing-off—that this house from the past isn't open to the speaker.
This opening stanza establishes the poem's form: it's a quatrain, or four-line stanza, with an alternating ABAB rhyme scheme. That is, lines 1 and 3 rhyme (a slant rhyme, technically: "supreme"/"been") as do lines 2 and 4 ("gutters"/"shutters").
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