That I might come even to his seat

The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:

The poem earns its quiet dignity through restraint. The physical details — bent back, feet remembering steps, hand on the rail — accumulate into a portrait of habitual grief or habitual faith, perhaps both at once, and the ambiguity feels intentional and true. The turn at "The tears on his cheeks, the stained glass, / reflect the light" is the poem's strongest moment: the syntactic yoking of tears and glass makes them briefly the same substance, both surfaces that catch and bend a single source of light. That is precise and moving.

The one element that works against the poem is the final phrase, "flickering in an unknown draft." After the carefully earned specificity of everything before it, "unknown draft" introduces a slightly explanatory, distancing note — as though the poem distrusts its own image and feels the need to account for the candle's movement. The flicker already carries uncertainty; the qualification may not be needed. Removing those final three words, or finding an image that stays as concrete as "tears" and "stained glass," would let the candle's instability speak for itself and keep the closing on the same register of restrained witness the rest of the poem achieves so well.

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This says many words in few. Your way of describing desperation is very well done, and you made excellent use of punctuation to express the pace. Very deft work.