Twenty words of body text, and the longest word in the poem is its title. "Anadromous" comes from Greek roots meaning "running upward." It describes fish that live in the sea but swim up rivers to spawn. Before the first line begins, then, we are told to expect a journey with a purpose. The poem skips to the end of that journey, and what waits there is a funeral. The text never says what kills the fish. For some anadromous species, though, arrival and ending are bound together, and the word "funeral" suggests the poem has this in mind.
The first line is built backwards: "hard is the funeral of the fish." Putting the adjective first gives the sentence the weight of an old saying or a lament. "Hard" also does double duty. It means painful, but it also means unyielding, a word for stone, frost and cold bodies, and it quietly prepares for the ice in the last line. The word "funeral" is stranger still. We use it for people, so applying it to fish makes a mismatch of scale. The effect isn't comic, though. The speaker takes the loss seriously, and that seriousness is the poem's whole tone. Notice, too, that the fish "come" in May. Mourners come to a funeral, but here the dead are the ones arriving, and they do it in the month of spring and renewal. Death and growth fall in the same season, and the poem gives us no comfort for that.
Then comes the white space, and the poem changes gear. Everything so far was a general statement, and now a person steps in: "I must keep one in ice." Nobody has asked the speaker to do this. The "must" is an obligation of conscience. The verb "keep" is the richest word in the line. We keep a secret, a promise, a vigil, a feast day, and we keep food from spoiling. The poem doesn't say which meaning applies, and the ambiguity is the point. The fish in the ice might be a specimen, a keepsake, a meal or a piece of mourning. And "one" stands against the many in line one. A whole run of fish cannot be given a proper funeral, so a single fish must carry the grief for all of them.
The sound of the poem is quiet but deliberate. There is no end rhyme, and the last words, "fish," "May" and "ice," don't chime. Yet small echoes hold the three lines together. "Funeral" and "fish" share an airy f. "Hard," "come" and "keep" are hard, clipped c and k sounds. "May" and "must" share their m. The speaker's "I" and the final "ice" share a long vowel, so the line begins and ends on the same sound, as if the self were closed in with the cold thing it keeps. Notice also the parallel phrases "in May" and "in ice," the same small frame holding a warm month and a frozen substance. Between those two phrases the poem moves from the time the fish arrive to the means of stopping time.
The rhythm helps with this. Line one has about four beats, and the second line drops away to a short, almost breathless phrase. Line three recovers with nearly every word stressed: I MUST KEEP ONE in ICE. It reads slowly and heavily, like deliberate footsteps. Apart from the title, "funeral" is the only word longer than one syllable, so the one ceremonial word stands out among plain, short ones.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. It offers no explanation and no adjectives for the fish. It doesn't tell us how to feel, and it refuses to sound sentimental. It turns grief into a small, physical act, which is perhaps what real mourning often is. The poem leaves us with a question as well as an image: what do we owe the creatures whose lives pass through ours, and is one fish in ice enough?