The title promises mist, yet the word never appears in the poem. What we get is what mist does: it hides the source of things. A cry comes "over the water / in the evening," and we are never told whose it is. It could be a bird, a person far off, or the speaker's own voice made large by the landscape. Sound carries farther than sight in a fog, and the poem leaves us in that position, hearing without seeing. "Great" is a big word for such a bare opening, and it suggests that the cry is felt as much as heard.
The second stanza turns from the landscape to the person listening, and it is the only place the speaker says "I." That pronoun sits in the middle line, between "who to love" and "as the timber," as if the speaker were hemmed in on both sides. There is no question mark after "who to love," so the question hangs in the air like the mist. The comparison "old / as the timber" is just as open. Timber is wood after the tree has stopped living, cut and seasoned, and given the watery setting one might picture beams or a landing stage, though the poem never says so. The grammar also leaves a gap. Is the speaker as old as timber, or as dry and hard? Either way, the image turns age into something weathered and a little stiff.
The final stanza brings the water back with the word "cove." A cove is a sheltered curve of coastline where boats can rest, so to speak of "the cove / of somebody" is to describe a person as a harbor. The phrase "full of care" works two ways, since it can mean tender and attentive, or weighed down by worry. A good shelter might be both. "Miss" is just as double-edged. It means to long for something gone, but a boat can also miss its mooring in the dark. The vague "somebody" keeps the poem from becoming a story about one particular loss. It could be a specific person or simply the need for anyone at all.
Formally, the poem is three unrhymed tercets with no capitals and no punctuation, and the lines are short, mostly two or three beats each. That lack of punctuation matters. The second and third stanzas run into each other as a single thread that could be a question, a confession or a lament. The rhythm does a little work too. In "a great cry," two heavy stresses sit side by side, which makes the first stanza end with a jolt. The poem's last line, "full of care," drops away softly by comparison.
The sounds are quietly organized as well. "Love" and "cove" look like a rhyme on the page but do not sound like one, an eye-rhyme that suits a poem about near-misses. The hard *c* of "cry" in the first stanza comes back in "cove" and "care" in the last, so the closing words seem to answer the opening cry. The long, rounded *o* sounds of "over," "old," "cove" and "somebody" give the poem a hollow, carrying quality, like a call across water.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so few words. The speaker never says "I am lonely." Everything the poem knows about loneliness comes from the water, the cry, the timber and the cove, and the landscape supplies the whole vocabulary of feeling. It has the compression of a haiku, though it doesn't follow that form. Its power lies in what it withholds: no named person, no event, no explanation. Like the mist of its title, it hides the edges of things and makes the reader fill in what is missing. The poem ends with no comfort or resolution, only a plain admission of a need that is hard to say aloud, in a voice that is quiet but meant to be heard.