Two voices share a desert night in this poem, and neither really hears the other. One belongs to the Sphinx, a "sullen rock in a sea of white" that has waited so long for its king that the years themselves "mock" it. The other belongs to a mother who rocks her baby and promises him a ride on the "Dream-horse white." Eugene Field places them side by side, and the gap between their two kinds of waiting is where the poem's meaning lives.
The Sphinx is trapped by loyalty. "Yet unto the word he gave I cling, / For he was a Pharaoh that set me here." Its devotion is real, but it is devotion to a promise made long ago. The king it imagines arrives "with centuries dight," as if time itself were his robe. The mother answers bluntly: "I know no king but my dark-eyed dear." The Pharaoh belongs to the past, while the king in her arms is the only one who can actually go anywhere. Love crowns the child, and the central idea follows from that. Warm, fragile, living things matter more than even the grandest monument of stone.
The structure supports this contrast. Each of the four stanzas has ten lines, split into two halves of five, and the rhyme pattern (ABAAB, CDCCD) repeats exactly. The first half of each stanza belongs to the narrator or the mother, and the second half to the Sphinx, whose words sit in quotation marks. In the final stanza the quotation marks disappear. The Sphinx stops speaking and is only described, "a ghostly, ghastly, shadowy thing," while the mother has the last word. Even so, the final line, "The coming king!", stays ambiguous. The Sphinx may still be fooled into thinking it hears a Pharaoh, or it may be catching the hoofbeats of a child's dream. The poem doesn't say whether it is comforted or deceived.
The sound of the verse does a lot of work. Many lines move in a galloping triple beat, as in "Swift as the burning winds that bear / The sand clouds over the desert wide," so the lullaby doubles as a ride. The closing line of each stanza is cut short ("Why tarrieth he!", "For him--my king!", "The wells off there!"), like a breath caught or a cradle suddenly stilled. The rhymes *night*, *white* and *light* return in almost every stanza, and their repetition is hypnotic, which suits a bedtime song. The word "ghostly" echoes in the same way. It begins as "ghostly shadow in ghostly light," returns as "ghostly shadows creep," and finally hardens into "ghostly, ghastly." Each repetition makes the Sphinx more spectral.
Word choice separates the speakers. The Sphinx talks in archaic words such as "tarrieth," "lo," "sere" and "dight," which make it sound centuries old. The mother's language is plain and tender: "babe," "bosom," "dear." Her playful "Aha" sounds like a parent adding a little excitement to a story to keep a child listening. The imagery follows the same division. The Sphinx's world is dry and pale, with a face that is "sere," a sea of sand and a ghostly light. The mother points her child toward "verdure and palms beside the wells," so the dream-horse carries him past the stone face and toward water and green life.
The poem is significant for the way it shrinks something enormous to the scale of a nursery. The Sphinx is one of the oldest and most intimidating symbols of antiquity, and here it becomes part of a bedtime story. Lullabies often keep the dark at bay by naming it and taming it, and this one does so with the darkest, oldest figure available. The label "Egyptian folk-song" gives the poem the feel of an ancient tale retold at a bedside. Beneath the charm lies a quiet reversal. The thing that has outlasted empires is left powerless, still listening for a king who will never come, while a sleepy baby holds the future.