I keep wanting to contribute poems to this thread yet failing to find anything that I think exactly meets the requirements. The gold standard is a poem that's new to many of us and that is both low-key and utterly without hope. Maybe because of where I live, I often look to poems about winter to find that mood.
Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man" is certainly silent and hopeless, but we all know it, I think. And I spent some time thinking about Richard Wilbur's
"Year's End" but decided that, although there's plenty of stillness and death and resignation in it, there's also an undercurrent of hope for "more time" because the New Year does, at the end, ring in.
Does this one fit the bill?
Traveling through the Dark
by William Stafford
Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.
By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.
My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.
The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.
I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.
The fact that the poet takes time to decide seems to say that some other choice was thinkable, and that he did think about it. So this is the moment of resignation rather than utter despair, but it certainly captures a moment when hope was given up.