Pickering opens with a flat, almost childlike exclamation, "How sad the winter is", and then spends the rest of the poem proving it. He never explains the sadness. He collects things that look like it. What emerges is a landscape of suspension: buds that have not swelled, walls that seem to be heading somewhere, and a spring that survives only as a ghost. The central idea is that winter is a time of waiting and loss, felt most sharply against the memory of warmth. Yet the poem ends on an image that is oddly light-hearted, as if the mind refuses to be entirely defeated.
The first simile sets the tone. Winter is "like a wick, / burned, in water". The comparison is unusual because it catches a particular kind of deadness: not a flame burning low, but one that has been put out, leaving something spent, soaked and blackened. The line breaks do some of the work. The commas around "burned" slow the reading and make the phrase sink. The people who follow are not called people at all but "sorrowful figures", silhouettes who "fend the cold off, shrilly / whistling and rubbing hands together". The whistling is shrill, and the "sh" and "s" sounds turn the thin, nervous noise of cold air into something audible. Human warmth here is small and fidgety, a gesture rather than a comfort.
In the second stanza the poem looks at what is waiting to happen. "Unswollen buds" is a striking choice. The negative prefix describes spring by what it hasn't done yet. Next to it come "discoloured grass and hard brown shoots", a list with no softening commas, as bare as the hedgerow. Then comes the stanza's one tall, clean shape: "the tall A of a telegraph pole". Seeing a pole as a letter is a lovely, slightly strange move. The pole belongs to a system of messages, yet here it is only a single character, the first in the alphabet, standing in a landscape that has nothing to say. It might suggest a beginning that hasn't started, though the poem leaves that open.
The structure is free verse with no rhyme and no steady metre. Line lengths shift with the sense, and the stanzas shrink from four lines to three and then to twos, as though the poem were losing heat as it goes. The third stanza makes the landscape eerily active. The birds "muster", a military word, as if they were being gathered for a hard campaign. The "aging walls / creep to the silent places on the hilltops", which turns stone into slow, tired creatures heading off to be quiet. Nothing in the scene moves quickly, and nothing speaks.
Then comes "Suddenly", and the texture changes. The sleet is "granite needles", a phrase of hard sounds that makes weather into stone and steel at once. The poem then does something quiet but important. After all this distant observation, a single "grey and wandering flake stops at my wrist." This is the first time the speaker appears, and the first time winter touches a body. The wrist is a vulnerable, intimate place, and the flake's behaviour, "wandering" and then stopping, gives it an almost animal gentleness after the needles. Cold stops being scenery and becomes contact.
The last stanza turns toward memory. The light is "the last year's April's phantom light", a stack of possessives that pushes spring back in time, so that even the light seems haunted by an earlier season. Winter is sad partly because it is a place where the past is only half visible. And then the final image: "a bootshaped cloud rides the elm copse." It is a small, humble, funny shape, a boot in the sky, and it echoes the walking, fidgeting figures from the opening. The verb "rides" gives it a confident motion that the earth below does not have. The poem does not say that spring is coming. It simply lets the imagination find a playful shape in the grey.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth reading. It builds a mood entirely from precise, unglamorous objects, a pole, a wall, a flake, a cloud, and trusts the reader to feel the connection between them. The sadness is real, but it is not self-pitying, because the speaker keeps looking, and what the looking finds at the very end is a shape to smile at.