Three fishermen sail into the night, and for most of the poem we never ask who they really are. Wynken, Blynken, and Nod climb into a wooden shoe, drift along "a river of misty light" and fish for herring in "a sea of dew." Only in the last stanza does the speaker lift the cover off the riddle: Wynken and Blynken are "two little eyes," Nod is "a little head," and the shoe is "a wee one's trundle-bed." The whole voyage is a child falling asleep. The central idea is that bedtime does not have to feel like an ending. Sleep can be the best adventure of the day.
The names do a lot of work before the reveal. Say them aloud and they turn into wink, blink and nod, the body's own signals of drowsiness, shrunk into babyish, playful forms. The refrain closing every stanza splits them across three short lines, so each name gets its own beat. "And Nod" comes last, and nothing in the poem rhymes with it. The stanza simply stops, like a head dropping onto a pillow. The "Dutch" of the title seems to fit the wooden shoe, which makes a homely, slightly foreign boat for a fairy-tale journey.
The construction is steady and repetitive, as a lullaby should be. Each stanza has nine lines followed by the three-line refrain, and the rhyme pattern is the same every time. Four lines alternate their rhymes (night/light and shoe/dew in the first stanza), four more do the same (wish/fish and three/sea), and the ninth line returns to the "-ee" sound with "we," "three," or "be." That sound, along with "sea," keeps washing back at the end of each stanza like a tide. The rhythm helps. Lines such as "Sailed off in a wooden shoe" have strong beats separated by light syllables, which gives a gentle rocking motion. A child hearing the poem is being rocked by the verse as well as told about rocking.
The imagery works by swapping one world for another. The sky becomes a sea, dew becomes water, and the stars become the herring-fish, so the nets "of silver and gold" can be read as moonlight and starlight. Even the foam is "twinkling." Nothing here is menacing. The old moon, who asks "Where are you going, and what do you wish?", sounds like a kindly adult checking on children out past their bedtime. When she laughs and sings, the night itself seems to take part in the lullaby. The stars, who might otherwise seem remote, answer in a cheerful, slightly old-fashioned voice: "never afeard are we!" The archaic "afeard" gives the line a folk-tale ring, and the reassurance seems aimed at any child nervous of the dark.
The third stanza handles the return trip with care. The shoe comes "down from the sky, / Bringing the fishermen home," and the voyage was "so pretty a sail, it seemed / As if it could not be." The speaker admits that "some folk thought 't was a dream they'd dreamed." That hedge prepares the ground for the answer. The speaker says "But I shall name you the fishermen three," as if setting a riddle's solution on the table.
The last stanza turns the poem inside out. The speaker now addresses the child directly: "shut your eyes while Mother sings / Of wonderful sights that be." The song we have been reading becomes the song the mother is singing. The instruction to close your eyes is also a promise, "you shall see the beautiful things," so what the child is asked to do (stop looking) is presented as the way to see more. The poem even slips a second rocking image into its last lines, "as you rock on the misty sea," so the boat and the bed are the same object.
This is why the poem is worth reading closely, even though it is a simple lullaby. It solves a real problem, a child's reluctance to give up the day, by making the unwanted thing the plot of a story. Its repeated sounds, steady rhyme and fading refrain all do what a lullaby has to do, which is slow the listener down. Its one clever move, saving the riddle's answer for the end, lets the child's own eyes and head be the heroes of the story.