The word "hug" never appears in the eight lines of "BIG HUG...". It sits in the title, and the poem spends everything else on what the embrace feels like from the inside. An unnamed "he" is at the end of his strength, then something presses against his chest, and then there is quiet. The central idea is simple and hard to argue with: when a person is coming apart, being held can do what no argument or plan can. The storm is never defeated. The self is simply collected again.
The construction is tidier than the ragged punctuation suggests. The rhyme runs AABCBCDD. A couplet of crisis opens it ("broke" and "choke"), a couplet of resolution closes it ("gather" and "together"), and between them the rhymes alternate, "along" with "long" and "his" with "abyss." One could say the interlocking middle mimics arms crossing, though that is an interpretation. Two of the rhymes are imperfect. "His" and "abyss" differ by a single sound, and "gather" only echoes "together." The effect is of a poem that is slightly unsteady even as it steadies.
There is no fixed meter. The lines are long and the stresses fall unevenly, so the poem moves at the pace of speech. The ellipses and double dots do the rhythmic work. In line 2, "Running out of air..as he started to choke..!", the dots cut the line like gasps. Near the end, the pause before "tightly together" is brief, and the line then runs on unbroken. The breath has come back.
The imagery begins with two kinds of overwhelm. The "tempest" is outside him, and the loss of air is inside. "His last hope broke" treats hope as something brittle, which quietly sets up the "pieces" of the last line. "Gravitate" is an odd, interesting choice. It suggests falling, but it also means being drawn toward something, so the word may foreshadow the embrace. That is an inference, but the poem's next move supports it. Line 4 ends on "his," and the noun is missing: "he felt another heartbeat press against his!" The reader has to supply "heartbeat," and in that gap the second heartbeat has already taken over the space.
The turn is wonderfully plain. "Silence replaced storm" has no struggle in it, just an exchange. "Time waited so long" makes time patient, as though the world agreed to hold still. Then comes the poem's best paradox: "reality escaped into a delightful abyss." An abyss is usually something to dread, and here it is delightful. Notice also who escapes. The man does not flee reality, reality leaves him, so he is passive, receiving rather than rescuing himself. The verb "yield" in line 3 starts out as surrender to the storm, but the arms turn it into a different kind of surrender.
The last two lines give him a little agency. "He let himself gather" works two ways: he is gathered in by the arms, and he pulls himself together. "Pieces" answers "broke," and "tightly together" is the poem's final phrase, so the sentence ends by doing what it describes. There is one more ambiguity in "For now he knew." It can mean "because now he knew," or it can mean "for the moment," which would make the comfort honest rather than permanent. I prefer the second reading, but the poem allows both.
The poem has flaws. "In his verge to yield" and "gravitate along" stretch the language, and the double exclamation marks at the end are loud. Still, they suit the feeling, which is relief too large for tidy punctuation. The poem's real strength is what it leaves out. The comforter has no name, no face, no speech, only a heartbeat and "those arms." That anonymity lets readers put their own rescuer there. The poem suggests that rescue need not be eloquent or solve anything. Sometimes it only has to be close enough to feel.