Twelve words, not counting the title, and a whole frozen village seems to spring up around them. A group of people labours at a sheet of ice, and underneath it lies the one source everyone shares. Yet the poem refuses to settle into a plain winter scene, because "cold people" is not the same as "people in the cold." The adjective belongs to the people themselves, so the weather and the temperament are already tangled together before the first line ends.
The verb phrase in the second line is where the poem begins to slip. "Work at the ice" could mean chipping it away to reach water, the way anyone with a frozen well would. It could just as easily mean tending the ice, keeping it going, being busy with coldness. The preposition "at" suggests effort that is repeated and never quite finished, as if the work were the point rather than the result. Whether these people are rescuers or the cause of the freeze is left open, and the poem may mean both.
The second couplet drops the verb altogether. "Even over love / our one well" is a fragment that hangs in the air, and with no punctuation to anchor it, it can be read in several ways. The ice may have formed even over love. The people may work at the ice even in place of love, or even in quarrels about love. The small word "over" does a lot of the work, since it is both physical (a lid across water) and abstract (a dispute "over" something). The poem lets those senses overlap instead of choosing one. In every reading, love comes second to the ice.
The shift of pronoun may be the most important move. The first couplet describes "people" at a distance, but the last line says "our." The speaker has been standing among the cold people all along, and the reader is pulled in too. The adjective "one" does double duty. It points to scarcity, since there is no second well and no alternative. It also suggests unity, something held in common. The well is also an old, easy image for a store of feeling, so the poem can be read as a community's water supply and as a couple's or family's shared depth of love. Ice over a well is a fitting image for what happens when people stop being able to reach that depth.
The sound of the poem is as sparing as its sense. There is no rhyme, and the lines are very short, running roughly three, four, five and then three syllables. The third line is the longest and wanders a little in "even over love," with its soft, rolling v sounds. Then the last line shuts like a lid with three heavy monosyllables, "our one well." Some quieter echoes tie the poem together. "Love" and "one" share a vowel, which quietly links love with oneness, and the l of "cold" returns in "well," so the poem begins and ends on the same liquid sound. By contrast, "ice" is the only long, bright i in the poem. It closes the first couplet like a hard edge, and nothing else sounds like it. The lowercase and the missing full stop leave the poem unfinished, so it never quite stops, which suits a poem about work that goes on.
The title adds to this. "Of ice" reads like the second half of a phrase, as in "people of ice," "a heart of ice," or "made of ice." The poem then supplies the missing first half in its own way, and the cold people turn out to be the ones made of the material they are working on. It is also worth noticing that water never appears. The poem shows the surface and the shaft beneath it, but not the thing that makes the well worth reaching. That absence is what everything in the poem depends on.
The poem's significance lies in how much it gets from so little. It does not say that people have grown cold, or that love has been buried beneath habit and argument, or that a community can exhaust itself fighting the wrong thing. It builds an image that lets the reader reach those ideas, and then withholds the comfort of a clear answer. A poem this short can only be completed by the reader, and "of ice" ends up fitting a frozen well, a strained marriage, a divided town, or the reader's own silence.