The speaker here sounds like the little salamander of the title, dreaming of the moment it can slip into freedom. It imagines that release as a night of stars and snow: cold, clear, and solitary. Frost becomes a strange kind of fire, lighting each step. The creature longs to be completely alone — “Nobody--nobody” — with no one watching, touching, or searching for it. In that hidden, freezing dark, it pictures itself dancing through the night as if it were burning.
The mood is hushed but thrilled, cold and feverish at once. There is a quiet ecstasy in the wish for privacy and wild movement. The poem turns loneliness into something close to joy, and turns the salamander’s imagined night into a secret, glittering world where being unseen means being truly free.