Six short lines, no rhyme, no capital letters and no full stop, yet "Deadening" holds a whole mood of winter and political weariness. The title is a participle, a word for something still happening, and the poem sets two kinds of deadening side by side. One is done to us by cold and by the state. The other is something we do to ourselves, on purpose, to get through it.
The first stanza has no verb at all. "Frost white on the fields / and in the news" is just a list of conditions, as if the world had stopped moving long enough to be photographed. The pairing of "on the fields" with "and in the news" is quietly clever. The grammar gives weather and politics equal weight, so a hard frost and a bad headline become the same kind of event. Then comes "the dead hand of the state." The phrase is borrowed, a stock piece of political complaint, and the poem lets it sit there unpolished, as if it were lifted straight from a newspaper. That suits a stanza about what the news does to language. It also echoes the title, with "dead" planted inside "deadening." The hand image even rhymes in meaning with the frost, since both lie over things and stop them growing.
The stanza break is a turn, and verbs arrive at last: "go," "get," "miss." The register drops from headline language to casual speech. Notice the pronoun, too. It is "we," not "they" and not "I." The speaker does not stand above the numbness and judge it but joins in. "We go out to get high" is the response of people who feel they can't change the news and so leave it behind. The next line is the most interesting: "and miss most of the words." Whose words? The news, a song, a conversation, the sense of whatever matters? The poem doesn't say, and the vagueness helps. The loss is also flat and unregretted, since "most" admits the damage without protest. There is an irony in a poem made of words that is about missing them.
"With moonshine in a sack" gives the ending its double edge. Moonshine is homemade liquor, but it is also moonlight, the pale glow that follows the white frost of the opening. The "sack" is homely and rustic, a paper-bag kind of word. "Get high" fits this too, since drink and moon both point upward, away from the dead hand pressing down. Because moonshine is illicit, you could read the bottle as a small, private defiance of the state. That is an inference, though, and the poem seems too wry to insist on it. The syntax also drifts. Does "with moonshine in a sack" describe how we go out, or what we miss the words with? The line floats loosely, the way thought does after a few drinks.
The sound work is plain and exact. Counting syllables gives 5, 4 and 6 in the first stanza, then 6, 6 and 6 in the second. The opening stanza lengthens toward "the dead hand of the state," where "dead hand" puts two stresses together and the line slows like a weight being laid down. The second stanza walks evenly, which suits its drifting, unhurried mood. Almost every word is a single syllable, and only "moonshine" and the title run longer. That keeps the voice flat and spoken, close to someone muttering rather than declaiming. The soft hum of "miss," "most" and "moonshine" gives the second stanza a blurred warmth, against the hard "frost," "state" and "sack." Nothing rhymes, and there is no final punctuation, so the poem stops on "sack" without closing. The numbness feels as if it will go on.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It could have been a protest, but it makes no demand and offers no solution. It does not even tell us whether to blame the "we" or sympathise with them, and it leaves that tension unresolved. In six lines it shows how public bleakness turns into private escape, and how escape can become another form of the deadening it was meant to relieve.