Waterfield's sonnet paints a bleak winter landscape and then turns it into a mirror for the speaker's state of mind. The sky is like steel, the hills are stone, and the bare trees look like prison bars. Wind howls and thunder cracks "like broken bone." Nature feels hostile, even threatening.
Inside, things are no better. The speaker counts what has been lost, feels that old certainties have failed, and sees life drained of colour. By the third stanza the season's "malice" seems to hang in the air, and despair settles in. Hope feels unreasonable.
The mood is heavy and oppressive for almost the whole poem, helped by the repeated "When" that piles up one misery after another. Then the closing couplet shifts. A "brighter dream" appears, one that faith and determination might still make real. The speaker doesn't claim the darkness has gone, but ends by holding onto the possibility of recovery.