A speaker walks a dog through a sleeping village in the winter dark, and every step becomes a kind of prayer. The title's "matins" means morning prayers, and the walk takes on that ritual feel. The person they are looking for is a woman who has died. The poem suggests she was close to the speaker, since it mentions shared work with the shovel and dirt dropped on her coffin.
What the speaker feels is a stubborn refusal to accept that she is simply gone. The line "such force cannot vanish into ash" returns again and again, and at the end it changes to the past tense: it "did not vanish." That small shift turns hope into certainty. Walking at her pace, the speaker feels her voice in their muscles, as if she lives on in the body.
The mood is quiet, damp, and tender. Grief is present, but so is comfort, and the repeating lines feel like steps taken one after another.