Three short stanzas, and a mood that moves from sound to loneliness. The poem opens with a scene: mist over water in the evening, broken by a great cry. We don't learn what makes the cry, a bird or something else, and that uncertainty lets it hang in the air, a little eerie and a little sad.
The cry seems to prompt the speaker's question: "who to love / now that I am old." Age has arrived, and with it a sense of being left without a companion. Comparing himself to "timber" suggests something dry, hard, and weathered, perhaps cut down or no longer growing. The last stanza turns the longing into something more specific. The speaker misses "the cove / of somebody / full of care," which pictures a person as a sheltered inlet, a place of calm where a boat might come to rest.
The mood is quiet, wistful, and tender. The water imagery ties the poem together: the open, misty evening outside matches the speaker's need for a safe harbor.