Most of this poem happens inside a head rather than in a place. For its first twenty-five lines, a speaker and a girl stand in falling snow, shiver, laugh and almost kiss. Then the speaker surfaces and finds himself somewhere much plainer. Judging by the board, the frustrated voice and the gathering of belongings, it is a classroom or lecture room. The central idea lives in the gap between the two halves: imagination can arrange a perfect scene, but one real, unreadable look can leave a person more unsettled than any dream.
The dream is built from cause and effect, which is what makes it feel so tidy. The wind rises, she shivers, he opens his jacket, she is warm. Even the weather works as a go-between, giving two people an excuse to stand close. The senses pile up as well: snow tangled in hair, perfume "sweet and candy-like", cheeks turning red, hazel eyes growing big. In this half the speaker is always the one who acts ("I open", "My hands wrap around you", "I lean in") and she responds ("You follow"). Even the "unseen force" he shelters her from sounds a little like a stand-in for the feeling between them, a force neither of them names.
The form suits this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only short, mostly end-stopped lines that read like a series of small snapshots. The repetitions give the dream its pulse. "You shiver, / You shiver again" and "You gaze up at me, / I gaze back" are mirrored pairs, and the mirroring does what the scene describes by making the two people move in step. The word "gaining" appears twice, once for her heartbeat and once for the laughter, and it is left without an object. The reader has to supply "speed" or "strength", which is slightly awkward but gives the sense of something building. Near the end the lines thin out into participles, "Snow falling, / Laughing, gazing", so that time seems to hang, before the sharp little verbs "lean in" and "follow" tip the scene toward the kiss. The dream stops at "Our lips brush", gentle and unfinished.
The waking half changes the texture at once. "Like a Phoenix rising" is the poem's grandest simile, but there is some irony in it, because a phoenix rises into brilliance and this speaker rises into a hazy room. The sensory richness thins to sight alone, and even that is "hazy", a word that sounds close to "hazel" and may quietly connect the two worlds. The board is "Graffitied by words", a vivid way to describe a surface scrawled over with writing, and it makes the lesson seem like clutter beside the dream's clean white snow. When the "voice asks something, frustrated", we get no question and no answer, only "I reply". The dream had no dialogue but was full of meaning, while the real world has speech and almost no meaning at all.
The most telling shift is grammatical. In the dream, he is in control. At the door, "Our eyes meet. / Hazel in blue" suggests two different eye colours, and the hazel recalls the girl of the dream. Then come the lines "It holds, / Something passes, / Then it's gone." Nobody is the subject of those verbs. Nothing is chosen or said, and the moment simply happens and ends. The speaker leaves "with curiosity", and the closing questions, "Could she? / Why would she?", are the only real speech he allows himself. They hold hope and self-doubt in the same breath.
The poem ends by looping back to its title, "To a Winter Dream", so that the speaker's mind literally returns where it began. That circle suggests he may keep revisiting the dream because the real answer is unavailable. The poem is not especially original in its materials, since snow, perfume and a near-kiss are familiar ones. Its value is in how recognisably it catches a very ordinary experience, in which a few seconds of eye contact are blown up into a whole imagined story, and the imagined version is at once more satisfying and more fragile than the truth it is trying to guess at.