Winter usually stands for endings, but in Francis Scudellari's "the eye of winter" it becomes something the speaker has to talk to, and the poem is about how hard it is to keep talking when ten attempts at hope have already vanished into whiteness. Its central idea is that a future is not the past restored. It is something made out of what has been learned, and it can only be brought into being by speaking it. By the final line, the speaker admits they cannot do this alone.
The opening plays on the word "eye." The speaker has "spoken ten futures / into the eye of a winter's white- / blinded was." The line break splits "white-" from "blinded," so the page itself goes blind for a moment, and "was" is turned from a verb into a noun, a frozen, snow-blinded Past. The speaker's response is stubborn: "I'll speak one more." Telling the next future to winter "not blinking" turns the exchange into a staring contest between a person who refuses to look away and a landscape that has already lost its sight.
The middle of the poem sorts out what that future will be. Three clauses move forward by negation: it "isn't what was, isn't what was lost, / but it is what we've learned." The repeated "isn't" clears the ground before the "but" arrives. The sudden "we" is worth noticing, because until then the speaker has been alone. Then comes a striking idea: "From it, / I'll take the chill. I've taken its biting / wind, to speak." The speaker needs breath to talk, and the only breath on offer is winter's own wind. To address the cold, the speaker must take it in, so speech has a cost, and the voice is partly made of the thing it argues with. The tenses shift from "I'll take" to "I've taken," as if the borrowing has already begun.
The poem's turn comes when a name is spoken, though we never learn whose. That silence is useful, because it lets a reader supply their own. The effect is immediate: "It assures / me. The eye of winter reassures me." The line break leaves "me" stranded at the start of a line, then "reassures" doubles the comfort by echoing "assures," as if the speaker is repeating it to be convinced. What reassures is oddly textured: "a web hidden in its cataract / white, whiter still." A cataract is a clouded lens, so it extends the blindness of the opening, and it also suggests a waterfall of ice. A web is a trap, but it is also a structure that holds things together. The "sticky crystals" are a deliberate oddity, since ice is not sticky and spider silk is. The phrase suggests that frost and web have merged, and that the future may be caught, held, and kept. What looked like blank whiteness turns out to be built.
The form suits all this. The poem has fourteen lines, the length of a sonnet, but there is no rhyme. The echoes are inside the lines instead: "assures" and "reassures," "white" and "whiter," and a run of w-sounds in "winter," "white," "was," "wind" and "web." The word "speak" returns again and again, until it starts to feel like a chant. Sentences stop and start in the middle of lines ("wind, to speak. And so, to speak / to it, I speak a name first"), and the halting syntax reads like speech in the cold, broken up by breath. If there is a sonnet-like turn, it comes around the ninth line, when the speaker stops commanding and starts being comforted.
The final line, "If you'll speak it to me," is what gives the poem its weight. The whole poem has been one person speaking into winter, and the ending reverses the direction. The future hidden in the web cannot be reached by the speaker's voice alone, and someone else must say it. The "if" leaves everything open, with no promise of an answer. That restraint is why the poem works. It offers a hope that depends on another person, and it is dated January 2014, a season that suits it, though the text never tells us what loss lies behind it. The reader is left as the "you" being asked to answer.