The poem turns on a twist of a familiar saying. "No news is good news" usually comforts us, but here the speaker flips it: "no news is plague news." Silence isn't peace. It's a kind of quarantine, where sick people are shut away and nobody pictures what they are going through.
The second stanza grows more personal and stranger. Saying that no news is "like meeting an angel" suggests something unsettling, a presence that is awe-inspiring but also heavy with meaning. The lines that follow ("more than air / more than some poor child") feel like the speaker reaching for comparisons and not quite landing on one, as if the feeling is bigger than any image. By the end, the speaker is "dying daily of sadness" with a heart "having nothing."
The mood is bleak, anxious, and hollow. What hurts most is the absence itself: the waiting, the not knowing, and the sense that silence can be its own form of suffering.