Midnight arrives in this poem as a single word, "Twelve." It stands alone on its line like a clock strike, and the title's "when it struck" echoes it. The verb has a second meaning, though. By the end, the New Year has struck the speaker more like a blow than a bell. The setting is humble: a bus, a half-sleeping passenger, a long road home. The poem starts in the noise of the present, with boys on bikes "yelling and screaming" their greetings, and drifts inward through remembered New Years to the people who are gone. Its central idea is that a night built for celebration can become a private reckoning, with what we have done, what we have failed to do, and whom we have lost.
The construction is plain free verse. There is no regular metre and no rhyme scheme, and the lines sound like speech, often trailing off in extra phrases ("Blaming self for the promises unkept, resolutions unresolved"). The poem gets its music from repetition instead. "Screaming" ends one line and opens the next, so the boys' noise seems to pile up and rush past the bus. In the third stanza the phrases "That of... That of... That spent... That by the side of the sea" form a list that mimics the way memories arrive, one after another and without order. The stanzas also shrink: six lines, then four, then a single line, then a closing pair. As the poem narrows, the speaker's world seems to narrow with it.
The remembered New Years fall into two groups. The first are wild, almost cinematic: lying in the middle of a highway, "dizzying hopping from bar to bar," shivering on a hilltop, parting from a love by the sea. These are told with energy, but the energy comes with risk and cold, and the last image is a farewell. The second group is flatter and lonelier. At home, the speaker is "indifferent, blank to the gyrating glitterati in the TV." The alliterative "g" sounds make the television's glamour seem both loud and meaningless. The speaker drinks alone, "bitter," which describes the drink and the mood at once. The pun in "resolutions unresolved" turns the usual New Year promise into a quiet admission of failure.
Between these memories sits the poem's warmest moment, almost hidden: "I love my fellow travelers." The semicolon before it makes it sound like a thought that slips out, unplanned. Judging by the imagery, the bus is the opposite of the parties and the empty living room. It is shared, unglamorous, and moving toward "home," a word that may carry more than its literal sense. The line "We have yet a long way to reach home" can easily be read as a comment on the year ahead as well as the road.
Then comes the poem's sharpest turn, a single line: "Chilling gusts of wind blast through the open window." On the surface it is just weather, and it fits the bus setting. But it is placed so that the cold feels like it comes from the memory itself. The word "blast" is blunt, and it breaks the drifting reverie. The final two lines turn from the speaker's own failings to other people: "those who were with us in the beginning of the last year / Yet no more." The pronoun shifts from "I" to "us," so the loss is shared and the dead were companions. The poem never names them or says how they were lost, and that restraint helps. The last phrase, "today, or ever, on another New Year day," shuts the door on any later celebration they might have joined.
The dateline, Trivandrum, 1 January 2012, makes the poem read like a note written on the day itself, though that is an inference from the heading and not a fact about how it was composed. What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about an occasion that usually demands cheerfulness. It does not scold the cheering boys, and it does not pretend the speaker feels their joy. It lets noise and silence sit side by side, and it suggests that every New Year is also a count of absences. The poem ends without comfort, which is part of why it feels true.