Wolves belong to packs, and people, we are often told, carry a light inside them. "the search" begins by taking both comforts away. Its speaker wanders a forest "in the darkest of nights", looking for something the poem never quite names. The nearest it comes is "a single soul", so the quest seems to be for company, for someone who might recognise them. The central idea is the loneliness of being given instructions about how to live by people who don't understand your situation, and the exhaustion that follows when the instructions fail.
The unnamed "they" matter as much as the speaker. They speak twice, and neither time do they help. First comes advice: follow "the light / that is supposed to shine / through my eyes". The phrase "supposed to" already carries doubt, a promise nobody has checked. Then comes a label: "they told me I look like a wolf". The light image is cleverly awkward, because light that shines *through* your eyes is something other people see, not something you can see yourself. The advice is useless to someone who, as the third stanza reveals, is "blind". That reveal changes how we read the opening, since the darkness of the forest may never have been only outside the speaker.
The wolf is the poem's richest image. A wolf in the woods suggests danger and wildness, which is how others see the speaker. But "out of the pack I was pushed" shows what the animal really is, an outcast rather than a predator. The inverted word order saves "pushed" for the end of the line so the force lands last, and the passive grammar leaves the pusher unnamed. Sound reinforces the picture. Wolf, woods, wilderness and world all share their w-sounds, as if the whole landscape were made of the same cold material.
The poem is free verse with no rhyme scheme, only faint echoes: "nights" and "light" sit on consecutive lines, and "wide" resonates with "eyes". The shape does more of the work. Both opening stanzas strand "I've" alone on a line, a small hesitation, as though the speaker must gather strength before finishing the sentence. The parallel openings make the stanzas feel like two nights of the same journey. Then the poem shrinks: six lines, six, four, three. It runs out of breath as the speaker does. In the third stanza, "what they don't see" is repeated, and the odd comma that follows it makes the confession halting. "given up" then sits alone on its line, and "or so I thought" pulls the thought back again.
The ending is where the poem turns. The tense changes from the ongoing "I've been searching" to the flat, final "I give up". "The search" is the only line, apart from those beginning with "I", to start with a capital, as if the search has at last become a thing formal enough to name, just in time to be abandoned. It is wedged between two identical "I give up" lines, enclosed on both sides. "Or so I thought" suggests the earlier giving up was not real, which makes this one sound different, either truer or more tired. Whether it is defeat or release the poem doesn't say. Perhaps stopping is a relief, since the speaker no longer has to chase a light they were never able to see.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses to console. No wise stranger appears, no dawn breaks, and nobody explains the light. It gives a voice to a particular tiredness, that of being told to "just follow your light", and quietly points out that well-meant advice can be a kind of blindness in the people who give it. The speaker is the one called blind, yet the poem implies that "they" are the ones who "don't see".