Eleven short lines, and for the first ten almost nothing moves. The poem begins in a bleak, cold place and ends with someone walking, and the stretch between is a single change of sensation. The speaker never says what caused the darkness, and the poem is stronger for it. Its central idea is that recovery may start small and in the body, as a flicker of warmth in one hand, and that this can be enough to get a person upright again.
The opening word, "Caliginous", is rare and means dark or misty. Most readers will have to pause over it, and that pause helps the poem. The word is itself a little foggy and hard to see through, and its four heavy syllables are followed at once by the blunt monosyllable "Cold". Then come "Somber", "Empty" and "Scattered", five adjectives with no verb among them. The grammar is stuck. Nothing is done and nobody acts, because there is only a list of conditions. Even the speaker is missing: no "I" or "my" appears until line seven. "Scattered" is deliberately open. It could describe thoughts, feelings or the surroundings, and the poem lets all three meanings hang together.
The turn comes with "Yet still numb". "Yet" concedes that something has changed, but "still" admits that the change is incomplete. The speaker does not suddenly feel better. Then comes the poem's first verb, "feels", in "My hand feels warm", and the self finally steps into the poem through a body part. Whose warmth this is, the poem doesn't say. It might be the speaker's own blood returning, or a held hand, or sunlight. The three adjectives that follow, "Inviting / Reassuring / Loving", suggest a hand that welcomes, though judging by the text alone we cannot be sure. Those three words answer the five dark ones. They are fewer, but they carry the poem's weight.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre, so the rhythm comes from the length of the words and lines. The cold words are hard and clipped, full of the stops and clicks of "Caliginous", "Cold" and "Scattered". The warm words are softer. "Inviting", "Reassuring" and "Loving" end in the open, continuous *-ing*, and the sounds of *l*, *r* and *v* run into one another. Read aloud, the three lines seem to loosen the mouth as the hand loosens. Their syllable counts, three, then four, then two, ease down into the gentle "Loving".
The last line is the longest and the only one that sounds like ordinary speech: "I walk proud yet again." Every word is a single syllable, and they fall almost like footsteps. After ten lines of fragments, the poem finally produces a full sentence with a subject and an action, and the grammar recovers along with the speaker. There is no full stop either, so the walking is left open and unfinished.
That line also reuses a word. "Yet" first marked a doubt ("Yet still numb") and now marks a return ("yet again"). The same small word has changed its job, which neatly shows how far the speaker has come. "Again" is quietly revealing too. It implies this has happened before, that the speaker has walked proudly in the past, lost it, and found it once more. The darkness may return, and the poem doesn't pretend otherwise. And "proud" is a carefully chosen word. The speaker is not described as happy or healed, only as holding themselves with dignity.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It names no cause and offers no explanation, and it trusts the reader to supply their own cold place. It also lets its form act out its meaning, so that a column of stalled adjectives gradually becomes a sentence that can walk. It is a poem about numbness that doesn't wallow in it, and one about hope that settles for a modest, believable kind: warmth in a hand and a steady step forward.