An antidote presupposes a poison, yet the poem never says what the poison is. The title is plural, and the six short lines that follow offer two remedies: a way of seeing and a way of meeting other people. Both begin with "to," and neither has a main verb to finish the thought. They read less like achievements than like aims, things the speaker wants and is still reaching for.
The first stanza is about perception. "To see simply" can mean to see in an uncomplicated way, or just to see, without commentary. "Beyond all words" pushes further, toward looking that comes before language or goes past it. There is a pleasing irony in what follows. "Wonderful" is itself a word, and it echoes the "words" two lines above, as though language were being used to point past itself. The phrase "rendering every body wonderful" holds a second ambiguity. "Rendering" can mean making, but it also belongs to the vocabulary of artists and translators, who render things in paint or in another tongue. Is wonder something this seeing creates, or something it accurately depicts? The poem leaves both readings open. Notice, too, that it writes "every body" as two words rather than "everybody." That small gap lets the physical body step forward. The wonder is not reserved for souls or ideas but for actual bodies, in all their variety.
The second stanza brings the poem down to earth. "To meet others as I find myself" is slightly slippery grammar. It could mean meeting others in whatever condition I happen to be in, or meeting them as fellow sufferers, on equal footing. Either way, the speaker does not approach from a height. The condition is spelled out in the next line: "with ash for dinner and a little hope." Ash is what remains after burning, and it carries old associations of mourning and loss. Setting it at the dinner table makes the bleakness domestic and almost matter-of-fact, with no self-pity in the tone. Then comes the modest "a little hope," a phrase that refuses to inflate itself.
The final line, "the frost will break," arrives with no "that" to introduce it, so the hope and the prediction blur together. We cannot quite tell whether the speaker is hoping *that* the frost will break or simply stating it. "Break" suits frost well. It suggests a thaw, but also a crack, like ice on a puddle giving way underfoot. Ash and frost make an interesting pair, since one is what fire leaves behind and the other is cold at its most rigid. The landscape the speaker moves through has been burnt and frozen both.
The construction supports this feeling of smallness. There is no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation, so nothing marks where a sentence ends. Even the last line has no full stop, which leaves the thaw uncompleted. The rhythm comes from line length. Counting syllables, the first stanza runs roughly four, four and about ten, while the second runs about nine, ten and four. The stanzas mirror each other. The first opens in two clipped lines and then expands into the long, generous "rendering every body wonderful." The second expands first and then contracts, ending on four plain, hard-edged syllables, "the frost will break." That short last line lands with a snap, a little like the sound it describes.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It does not promise a cure, and an antidote does not remove a poison anyway. It only works against it. The remedies offered are ones anyone could practise: looking without commentary, meeting people honestly, and holding on to a small hope in cold conditions. The first stanza is wide and generous, taking in "every body," while the second is humble and concrete, with its dinner of ash. The poem asks us to hold both at once, wonder and hardship side by side. In so few words it leaves a good deal of work for the reader, who must decide what the poison is and how much of it is in their own life.