In about thirty words, with no punctuation and no capital letters, "Wintry" sets up a whole small society: a silent head, a class of people assigned the cold, and a crowd playing at being an audience. The poem gives no setting and tells no story, so its meaning depends on how a few images press against each other.
The first stanza is the strangest. "words live like a cross / in a quiet head." Words don't normally "live" like anything. We expect them to be spoken, printed or overheard, but here they are lodged inside a head and kept quiet. The simile is deliberately open. A cross can be a burden carried, a religious emblem, a mark of suffering, or simply the point where two lines meet. With no punctuation to narrow it down, all of these stay in play. What does come through is that language here is private and heavy, something borne rather than shared.
The second stanza begins with "where," which grammatically makes the quiet head the place where "winter is appointed / to the poor." The verb is the surprise. People are appointed to posts, offices and duties, so winter becomes an assignment handed down by some unseen authority, closer to a sentence than to weather. The poor are the obvious recipients, since cold hits hardest where heating is scarce. But because the stanza follows the burdened, silent head, "poor" may stretch beyond money, to those without a voice or an audience. That is an inference, and the poem leaves it open. The line break helps: "appointed" hangs at the end of its line, and "to the poor," the shortest line in the poem at three syllables, falls like a verdict.
The third stanza turns outward. "everybody else acting / the part of a public." The phrase "everybody else" is a sweeping dismissal, and the break after "acting" lets the word mean both "behaving" and "performing" before the next line settles it. Then comes the odd phrasing: "a public," not "the public." A public becomes a part in a play, something you can take on like a costume. The rest of the world is not enduring winter. It is gathered as spectators, and it plays that role. There is irony in setting "public," a word that suggests openness and exposure, against the "quiet head" of the first stanza. The stanza also has no verb of its own, so it clings to what came before. Whether the acting is a cause, a consequence or merely a coincidence of the poor's winter, the grammar will not say.
Structurally, the poem is three unrhymed tercets of free verse. Line lengths run roughly five and five syllables, then seven and three, then seven and six, so the lines swell and snap rather than settle into a steady beat. Rhyme is replaced by quieter echoes. The "w" of "words" returns in "winter," tying the private head to the season. In the last two stanzas hard "p" sounds cluster in "appointed," "poor," "part" and "public." As the poem approaches the crowd, the consonants become percussive, which is perhaps a faint suggestion of applause. The missing full stop matters as well. The poem ends on "public" without closing, as if the performance were still going on.
The title also repays attention. "Wintry" is an adjective, a quality of feeling rather than a season. The poem is less about winter than about a wintry condition, in which words are held in and cold is allotted, while others take their places in the stalls.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves for the reader to do. It sets private language against public performance and hints at a social unfairness, but it never lectures. It doesn't tell us whether the speaker belongs to the poor or is watching them, whether the quiet head is a refuge or a prison, or whether the "public" is merely indifferent or cruel. A student can reasonably argue any of these positions from the text, and that open, unresolved tension is the poem's real achievement. In so few words it makes a reader feel the chill and then ask who is watching, and who is not.