Winter never appears in the body of Ram Krishna Singh's poem. It sits in the title, and everything after it is arithmetic: the day shorter, the night longer. The poem's central idea is that this change in the calendar does not stay outside. A longer night should mean more rest, but the speaker gets only sleeplessness, and the season turns into a state of mind.
The first stanza sets this up in five bare lines. "And yet sleepless" is the hinge. "And yet" admits that the reader's expectation is reasonable, and then the poem refuses it. The next line, "suffer the dark", has no subject, so it could be a private instruction or a plain statement of what happens every night. Then comes "in the air in bed", with no comma to separate the two places. The dark is in the atmosphere and in the most personal spot a person has, and without punctuation the speaker cannot say where one ends and the other begins.
That missing punctuation is part of the poem's design. There are no full stops, no commas and no rhyme, and the lines are short, often only three or four words. "Shorter" and "longer" share an ending and give a faint echo, but nothing is tied off the way a rhymed couplet would tie it. Sentences drift into one another like hours that no one is counting. The stanzas run five lines, then three, then four, so the middle one is the narrowest, as if the poem itself were shrinking like the day.
That middle stanza brings in the first "I" and the poem's most striking image. The speaker listens to "roar / or whisper of / wingless worries". The worries come at either extreme of volume, with nothing in between to rest on. The adjective "wingless" matters most. Wings suggest escape, thoughts lifting and drifting away, but these worries stay on the ground, heavy and stuck in the room. The sounds help, too: "whisper", "wingless" and "worries" share a breathy *w*, so the words half-whisper as you read them. The line break after "of" leaves the preposition hanging at the end of the line, as if the speaker's attention had trailed off.
The last stanza turns on the poem's own method. "No high poetry", the speaker says, which sounds like a refusal to dress the night up as something grand. What he offers instead is "nightmares trimming / the sun and the sky". "Trimming" is an ordinary, almost domestic verb, the kind used for hedges, hair or the edges of cloth. Used here, it makes the nightmares seem small, steady and methodical, and it echoes the shortened day of the first stanza. Light is being cut back, line by line.
The final phrase, "that could never be", can be read in two ways. It may describe the sun and sky as something unreachable, a brightness the sleepless mind cannot picture. Or it may describe the nightmares as things that could not really happen, which is no comfort at that hour. The poem does not choose between them. It stops, and the reader is left awake with the doubt, as the speaker is.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves out. There is no snow, no frost and no cosy fire, none of the usual furniture of a winter poem. Singh gives only the lengthening dark, a body in bed and a mind that will not settle. The line "no high poetry" also works as a small statement about what poetry can be: not elevation, but an honest record of a bad night. Almost everyone has lain awake while worries grew louder than they deserved, and the poem names that experience in plain words, with no ornament to hide behind.