Nobody in this tiny poem actually writes anything. That is its quiet joke and its quiet sadness. Under the title "Someday writer", everything is saved, wished, intended or blocked, and the promised letter stays unwritten. In six short lines the speaker offers ash, a river, ships, a rose and a home of ice, and leaves us to find the connection. The central idea seems to be the distance between the writer someone hopes to become and the scruple that keeps putting that person off.
The first couplet sets up a puzzle. "I saved part of myself in ash." Saving suggests something precious, but ash is what remains after burning, so the line reads as loss and precaution at once. Ash can also cover embers and keep them alive overnight, and the line allows that reading too: a small warmth held back for later. Then comes "as a wish as a river", with no punctuation and the little word "as" doing double duty. The self may be saved in the form of a wish, or in the way a river carries things. The poem never chooses. Either way, the saved part is not static. Wishes and rivers both reach toward somewhere else.
The second couplet gives that movement a direction. Rivers run to harbours, so "to visit the ships" sounds natural, and ships mean distance and departure. Then the line breaks on "write", so the verb hangs in the air for a moment before its odd object arrives: "a letter to a rose". A rose cannot read and cannot reply. It is also rooted in one spot, where the ships are made to travel. The letter is tender and slightly absurd, addressed to something that can only receive it silently. Notice, too, that "to visit" and "write" are infinitives. They name intentions, not events, and the poem never moves them into the past tense.
The third couplet does exactly that, with a blunt "I had". After the dreamy wishing comes a fact. The speaker "had a punishing scruple / like a home of ice." A scruple is a small moral hesitation, and the word is related to a Latin term for a tiny sharp stone. "Punishing" makes that little stone enormous. The final simile is the most striking image in the poem because a home is meant to be warm. A home of ice shelters and chills in the same breath. It also preserves, which fits a writer who keeps everything intact by never risking the page. Set against the opening, the poem runs from burnt-out ash to frozen water, with the flowing river caught between them. One reading is that the wish has room to move only in the narrow space between two kinds of lifelessness.
The form carries the mood. There are three unrhymed couplets with no punctuation and no capitals apart from "I". Judging by the line lengths, the second line of each couplet is shorter than the first, and the last line is the shortest of all, so the poem seems to shrink and end on the hard, closed word "ice". The sounds do quiet work as well. The soft "sh" runs through "ash", "wish", "ships" and "punishing", a hushing sound that suits restraint. "Write" and "ice" chime faintly at different points, joining the act of writing to the cold that threatens it. With no full stops, the lines slide into one another the way images do in a dream, and the reader supplies the logic.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it turns self-doubt and procrastination into things we can see instead of explaining them. It never says "I was afraid to write." It gives us ash, a river and a house of ice, and the feeling arrives before the idea does. It also leaves a small twist for the attentive reader. The poem is itself a short piece of writing, so perhaps the someday writer has quietly begun, sending a few cold, bright lines toward a rose that cannot answer.