The poem begins with a wish, not a statement: "O for the coat of a dog / in a chill wind." The speaker doesn't want a better jacket. He wants a pelt, the thick, built-in warmth of an animal that never has to think about being cold. The next image pushes this further, since the speaker also wants "a bear / pleasant as a storm." That comparison is deliberately uneasy. Storms are rarely pleasant, and bears even less so, yet the speaker is drawn to both. What he seems to long for is closeness to wild things without the fear that normally comes with them.
The second stanza moves into the woods, and the language gets sly. "Canonical" is a heavy, bookish word, meaning something like "officially recognised" or "standard." The woods are the traditional place for trouble, as any fairy tale would confirm. But the word also hints at literature's canon, as if the forest were a well-worn setting that poets keep returning to. Then comes a surprise: this trouble-ridden place is "full of such / extraordinary rooms." The woods become a house, and the next stanza adds the furnishings, "curtains of light," presumably sun filtering through leaves. Danger and domestic comfort share the same space, and the speaker goes there "to sleep."
What happens next is eerie. Sleep brings "enchantments / whispering in the ear," and the speaker lies "flat on the ground / as if dead." The "as if" matters. He is not dead, only imitating it, which may recall the folk advice to play dead when a bear approaches, though the poem never says so. The line "fingers as high / as they could reach" is pleasingly ambiguous. It could be his own hand stretching upward, or the branches overhead, or grass and stems, so that for a moment the body and the woods blur together.
The form supports this blurring. There are five quatrains, with no rhyme, no punctuation and almost no capital letters apart from the opening "O" and the pronoun "I." Without full stops, each stanza slides into the next, and the reader decides where one thought ends. The line breaks do much of the work. "Saying the words that make / the words strange" pauses on "make," so we briefly expect something to be made before the sentence turns back on language itself. Sound ties the poem together quietly too: *wind*, *woods*, *whispering* and *words* all share that soft w, as if the wind in the trees and the speaker's murmuring were one breath.
The last stanza explains the title. Rearranged into ordinary order, the final sentence says: "I believe that only saying the words that make the words strange will preserve us." The poem scrambles its own grammar, putting the action first and leaving "that only" hanging at the line's end, which is a small demonstration of its claim. "Spell" works in two ways. A spell is an incantation, and to spell is to break a word into letters, which is exactly what makes a familiar word look odd. Anyone who has stared at a common word until it stopped looking like a word knows the effect. The speaker proposes that this estrangement is protective, a charm against whatever lurks in the woods or in the ordinary world.
The word "believe" matters here. The speaker doesn't claim to know that strange words will save us. He says he believes it, and this humility keeps the poem from sounding like a manifesto. It also makes the opening wish for a dog's coat easier to read. The speaker lacks an animal's natural armour, so he reaches for the only covering a human has, which is language, made unfamiliar enough to feel alive.
The poem's significance lies in how lightly it makes a large argument. Without lecturing, it suggests that poetry is not decoration but a kind of shelter, something we put on against the cold. By the end, the odd phrasing, the pairing of storms with pleasantness and the woods furnished with rooms all read as examples of the strange words it recommends.