A night ferry heads for Kirkwall, the main town of Orkney, and the speaker is on it, sick and scared. Darkness thickens, the sea heaves, and a lit island slides past in the gloom. Then the speaker's body starts to fail, with nausea and the sense of a coming blackout, and the poem ends on a small act of self-control: breathe, and stay conscious. The central idea is that in moments of disorientation, simply remaining present can be an achievement. Nothing dramatic happens, and the poem shows how big that ordinary struggle feels from the inside.
The grammar quietly tracks this struggle. The first line, "Felt around darkness on", has no subject at all, as if the speaker has been erased by the night. In the next stanza the speaker appears only as an object: "Night was chasing me." Not until the island stanza does "I" take charge of a verb ("I saw an unknown Isle"), and by the final stanza the speaker is repeating, feeling and, at last, "still there." The poem begins with a person lost in the dark and ends with one who has pulled themselves back into a sentence.
The sea is where the imagery is most vivid. It is "a ferocious monster, / ready to swallow every sign / of happiness." The monster is a familiar figure, but the poem gives it a strange, domestic twist: it covers happiness "under a white foam coat." A coat suggests something you put over a body to hide it, so the image is oddly gentle and more unsettling for it. The enjambment helps. The sentence tumbles over four lines without a stop, as if the sea were gulping it down. Note too that the happiness is never described. It is only a "sign," a faint trace the water threatens to erase, which makes the fear feel emotional as well as physical.
Against all this stands the island, "silent and dark but awake / by the lonely lighthouse." The word "awake" gives the place a personality, and it mirrors the speaker, who is also alone and watchful in the dark. The "gate lightly torched" is a little puzzling. It may be a dimly lit opening on the ferry, but the poem doesn't say. The faint, uncertain light fits the mood either way. Even the lighthouse, normally a symbol of safety, is "lonely" rather than reassuring.
The form is free verse with no rhyme and short, plain lines, so the poem feels like a quick, nervous note rather than a polished set piece. Its English sometimes bends away from idiom: "I was sat by the bench," "feeling sick at the point / I thought to dream." Whether deliberate or not, these odd constructions add to the unsteady, slightly woozy tone. The phrase "at the point I thought to dream" is the key moment. Seasickness, exhaustion and sleep blur into one another, and the speaker can no longer tell where reality stops. The title's "Foggy" never reappears in the body of the poem, which makes the fog feel less like weather and more like the state of the speaker's mind. The number "6" in the title hints that this is one piece in a longer sequence, but the poem works on its own.
The ending is the best moment. "Breath in, breath out" is the only line that sounds like a voice, and its two-beat rhythm becomes the rhythm of breathing itself. The last line is flat and unadorned: "but I was still there." The word "still" carries two meanings, remaining and motionless, so the speaker has survived by holding on rather than by conquering anything.
What makes the poem worth reading is this honesty about scale. It doesn't turn a rough crossing into a grand drama. It stays close to the body and the senses and lets a small victory feel real. Anyone who has felt panic rising on a journey will recognise the instruction the speaker gives themselves, and the poem treats that quiet effort with respect.