The poem (or poem-fragment) begins with a strong central image: "This living hand." The speaker, or the poet, is pointing to a part of their own body—perhaps the very hand they're using to write the poem.
They stress that it's a "living" hand: a curious detail, which may cause the reader to wonder why it's necessary. Why does this speaker feel the need to stress that they're not dead? The pause, or caesura, that follows these first three words adds a touch of extra emphasis, causing the image to linger for a moment.
The speaker then adds that their hand is "warm and capable." This phrase restates the idea that the hand is alive; it's "warm" with blood, and it can do the things hands normally do. (The enjambment after "capable" highlights this word, and therefore highlights the hand's lack of dysfunction or disability.) The hand is capable, for example, of "earnest grasping"—a phrase that suggests the firm, sincere clasping of another person's hand. It's worth noting, too, that while Keats wrote these lines, the thing he was "grasping" was a pen. This speaker is eager to stress that they are very much alive—able to bond with others, love, write, etc.
But then there's a shift in mood. In lines 2-3, the speaker begins to imagine what the hand "would" do if it weren't alive—"if it were cold / And in the icy silence of the tomb." The initial description of the hand, then, has set up an antithesis:
- Alive, the speaker's hand is warm and able to connect with others, whether through direct touch or writing.
- If dead, however, it would be cold and unable to communicate—stuck in "the icy silence" of the grave.
The speaker is imagining what would happen after their own death, and needless to say, it's not a pleasant thought. (Keats wrote the poem while he was ill with tuberculosis, a disease that would kill him just over a year later, so many readers have assumed the poem was inspired by his own condition—though critics are divided on this point.)
The poem unfolds in blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter. (That is, the lines tend contain five iambs, poetic feet with a da-DUM rhythm.) This is a highly traditional form in English poetry, and it's especially prevalent in English verse drama (like Shakespeare's plays). Some critics speculate that Keats meant to put the poem in a verse play of his own. Whether or not that's true, the poem is intensely dramatic, and blank verse—which is thought to closely mimic the natural speech rhythms of English—is a natural, flexible medium for that drama.