Eleven words, no main verb, and "Blear" still manages to drag the sky down into the human body. It sets two images side by side and refuses to explain how they connect. In the first, ice closes around the moon like a trap. In the second, a speaker admits that his left eye is "troubled with rheum." The cold, silvery moon meets an unglamorous fact of the body, and the poem is about the space between them: how we never see the world cleanly, because we always see it through ourselves.
The first couplet is the more dramatic. "Ice like a trap / for the moon" is a simile that turns a frozen surface into something with jaws. The poem doesn't say whether the moon's reflection is caught in a frozen pool, or the moon is glimpsed through a glazed window, or the sky itself seems iced over. That vagueness helps. The line break after "trap" lets the word hang for a moment before its victim arrives, and the moon, usually remote and serene, becomes an animal caught in the dark. The verb "to trap" brings in hunting and stillness, as if the night had been waiting for it.
The second couplet drops from the cosmic to the intimate. The first-person pronoun appears only here, in "my left eye," and the exactness of "left" is almost comic, the way a patient talks to a doctor. "Rheum" is an old, slightly clinical word for the watery discharge that gathers in a sore eye. It is not a pretty word, and the poet doesn't dress it up. "Troubled" is gentler, and it quietly echoes the phrase "troubled waters," so the eye seems to be a small pool disturbed from within, set against the frozen stillness of the first image.
The title explains how the two halves fit. "Blear" means to dim or blur, and it is the root of "bleary." Once we have it, we can read the poem in two ways. The couplets may be two separate observations, a cold night and a sore eye. Or the film over the speaker's eye may be what turns the moon's light into something caught and clouded, so that the "trap" is partly the speaker's own failing sight. The eye is round and pale like the moon, and it too is held fast, by its own fluid. The poem never says which reading is right, and the reader's mind keeps moving between them, much as vision swims when you rub a tired eye.
The form supports this slow blurring. There is no punctuation and no capital letter, so the poem seems to float, with nothing to mark where one thought ends. The line lengths make a quiet mirror: counting syllables, the lines run four, three, three, four, so the two stanzas fold toward each other like the halves of a hinge. The sounds link them too. The long *i* of "ice," "like," "my" and "eye" runs through both couplets, and the final words, "moon" and "rheum," nearly rhyme. They share a vowel and a closing hum of nasal sound, so the moon and the diseased eye end up in a faint echo of each other. A reader hears the connection before working out what it means.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it does and how much it leaves open. The moon is one of the most overused subjects in poetry, and the usual move is to praise it or long for it. Here it is shown caught and a little helpless, and the poet's own body gets equal weight. That humility is the point. The speaker doesn't stand above nature as a grand observer. He is a creature with a sore eye, squinting through a smear. The poem ends on its least beautiful word, which is an honest choice, since it suggests that real seeing always includes the nuisance of the one who sees. Behind that is a question the poem leaves for us: when the moon looks trapped, is the trap out in the night, or in the eye?