Grief usually comes after a death, but Ruth Jewell's "How Do I …" is about mourning someone who is still alive. The speaker is losing a loved one gradually, and the poem never says why. Judging by the details, the person is losing their grip on who they are and who the speaker is: "Some days you are you," and on others "a little more / Is gone." The line "You don't understand" suggests an illness of the mind, perhaps dementia, though the poem leaves it unnamed. Its central idea is that this kind of loss is hard to speak about, because there is no funeral, no single moment of ending, and no one to say the words to who can take them in.
That difficulty is built into the poem's frame. It opens and closes with the same three lines: "How do I put into words / A grief so deep / It scalds my heart?" The repetition makes the poem circular. Nothing has been solved by the end, and the speaker is back where she started. Even the title is unfinished. "How Do I …" trails off in an ellipsis, as though the speaker cannot complete the thought, while the first line completes it. It is a small detail, but it echoes the fading of the person she loves.
The poem uses no rhyme and no regular metre. Its seven three-line stanzas are made of short, plain lines, and the line breaks do much of the work. "How does / This soul so lonely say / I miss you?" stops after "How does," as if the speaker is struggling to start. Several lines end on small connecting words: "You are my love, and"; "Some days you are you, and"; "to stay, don't go, but." These words promise a continuation and then make us wait for it. The speaker seems to hover at the edge of each sentence, unsure how to finish it.
The imagery is sparse but striking. "Scalds" is a harsh word. It suggests boiling water, a pain that is sudden and physical, not the soft sadness the word "grief" can imply. Against this heat, the loved one is "drifting away," a slow, quiet movement that suggests a boat slipping its mooring or a current carrying someone off. The "deep" grief fits this water image too. The speaker is dealing with fierce pain and gradual drift at once, and "scalds" and "drifting" show how different the two feel.
The poem also measures loss in small amounts: "Bit by bit I am losing you," and "a little more / Is gone." Nothing dramatic happens, and that is the cruelty. The loss is a series of small subtractions with no fixed endpoint. The phrase "Some days you are you" is worth pausing on. It sounds like a simple statement, but it quietly admits that on other days the person is not themselves, and that identity can come and go.
The sixth stanza is the emotional turn. After asking how to say "I miss you," the speaker says it: "I love you, / I always will, / And I miss you." The language is as plain as it can be, with no metaphor at all, which suggests that when feeling is strongest, ornament falls away. The future tense of "I always will" looks past the present decline to a love that will outlast it. Even so, the poem does not end on comfort. It returns to the opening question, as if saying the words once has not made the grief any easier to express.
The speaker is addressing someone who "doesn't understand," so the poem is a kind of one-sided conversation. We overhear words the loved one may never be able to take in. This gives the poem its quiet ache: the speaker is lonely even while the person she loves is still there ("This soul so lonely").
Its significance lies in this honesty. Jewell does not explain or console, and she doesn't claim that putting grief into words will heal it. She gives voice to a situation many families face and few poems name directly, in language simple enough that any reader can recognise it. The unanswered question at the start and end is the poem's real point: some grief is too large for words, and the attempt to speak it is still an act of love.