Cold is the only reason the poem gives, and it gives it first. "Being very cold, I went / all alone to the sun" has the flat confidence of a fairy tale: a need, a journey, no argument. Nobody asks how a person walks to the sun, or why it should be somewhere you can reach. The poem accepts its own logic and invites us to do the same. What follows, though, is not arrival or warmth but two comparisons that make the sun stranger rather than closer.
First, the sun "was at sea." Literally, that suggests a sun low over the water, the way it sits at the end of a day. But "at sea" is also an idiom for being lost or bewildered, so the phrase quietly makes the sun as disoriented as the traveller. Then comes the first simile, "like / a dinner coming on table." The line break after "like" leaves the comparison hanging for a beat, as if the speaker were hunting for the right image. "Coming on table" is slightly off-kilter English, missing the small word we expect ("to the table"), yet it carries two hints at once: evening "coming on," and food being brought out. A reddening sun over the sea starts to look like a dish being served, warm and glowing, and still out of reach of someone who is freezing. And the speaker "could not interpret" it. That verb is the poem's most surprising choice. You interpret a dream, a text, an omen. You do not normally interpret dinner. The word turns the sun into a sign, something that seems to mean without saying what.
The second simile, "or the first walk on water / by a dark swan," does not clear things up. It offers an alternative. The small word "or" matters here: the speaker is not sure which comparison fits and does not mind leaving both standing. Swans swim, so a swan's "walk on water" is a small impossibility, though a swan landing or taking off, feet slapping the surface, can look very much like walking. "First" makes the moment mythic, as if this were the original instance of a miracle, performed by a bird. The poem names no one else, but the phrase can hardly avoid echoing the familiar story of walking on water. Then "dark" adds a last inversion. The swan of convention is white, and this one is dark, set against a bright sun, so the poem ends on a shadow rather than on light. Someone who set out for warmth finishes by watching a dark shape cross a shining surface.
The form is as spare as the story. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Counting syllables, the lines run six, six, five, seven, seven, seven, four. They swell gently and then drop away, so the short last line, "by a dark swan," feels like a landing. Its two stressed words side by side slow the voice to a stop. The whole poem is a single sentence with no full stop until the end, which makes it read as one continuous movement, like the walk itself, never pausing to explain. Sound does some of the work that rhyme would. "Sun," "sea" and "swan" all begin with the same hissing s and are spread across the poem: the sun in line two, the sea in line three, the swan in the last line. They quietly link light, water and bird. The long, hollow vowels of "cold," "alone" and "all" give the opening a lonely sound, and the hard d of "dinner" and "dark" gives the later images a sharper edge.
What makes the poem worth reading is the gap between its manner and its material. The diction is plain, almost childlike ("very cold," "all alone"), while the images refuse to settle into a single meaning. It also admits the limits of its own metaphors: "I could not interpret" is an honest confession in the middle of a poem made of interpretations. Judging by the imagery, the cold and the journey suggest a longing for something large, perhaps comfort or meaning, which appears vividly but will not explain itself. For a student reader, that is a useful lesson. Not every poem is a puzzle with a hidden answer. Some are about standing in front of something beautiful and unreadable, and noticing exactly how it looks.