Almost nothing happens in Eugene Field's "Some time", and that is where its power comes from. A speaker wakes in the night, thinks they hear a sleeping child sigh, creeps to the crib, watches for a while, and kisses the child's forehead. Then the poem leaves the bedroom and jumps ahead to a day when the grown child will stand beside the speaker's body. Its central idea is that a love this deep cannot be fully understood by the person who receives it, at least not until much later and not until it has been lost.
The refrain carries this idea. Every stanza ends on nearly the same pair of lines: "You are too young to know it now, / But some time you shall know!" The repetition sounds like a promise, but the small changes matter. In the second stanza the certainty slips to "you may know", as if the speaker, picturing a coffin-side scene, loses their nerve for a moment. In the third, the exclamation mark is gone and the line closes with a plain full stop: "shall know." The excitement drains away and only quiet assurance is left.
The form is simple and songlike. Each stanza has eight lines rhymed ABABCDCD, and the lines alternate between four beats and three, a rocking movement that suits a bedside scene. The opening lines show it: "Last night, my darling, as you slept, / I thought I heard you sigh." The vocabulary is almost entirely plain and short, with nothing ornamental to get between the reader and the feeling. One rhyme returns in every stanza, "brow" with "now", so the forehead becomes the poem's fixed point. It is kissed in the first stanza, "wrinkled" in the second, and felt again in memory in the third: "feel once more upon your brow / The kiss of long ago." The smooth brow of the child and the wrinkled one of the dead face are set against each other across the whole span of a life.
The second stanza turns the first one inside out. At the start, the speaker watches over a sleeping child. Later, "Your eyes shall look upon a face / Calm in eternal sleep", so the child becomes the watcher and the speaker the sleeper. The poem never says whose face this is, but the third stanza's "see me here to-night" strongly implies it. The word "sleep" ends line four of this stanza, echoing "slept" in the poem's first line and quietly joining the two kinds of sleep. Death is never named. It arrives through "a darkened place / Where others come to weep" and through physical details: "voiceless lips" and "the patient smile". "Voiceless" is the sharpest of these. Those lips can no longer say "I love you", which is why the poem has to say it now, in writing. "Patient" suggests the speaker's own waiting for the child to understand.
The last stanza folds three moments together. The kiss happened last night. The speaker is writing now, with tears "falling as I write". The reader is somewhere in a future the speaker will not see. The commands "Look backward", "See", "feel" treat memory as a sense the child can switch on, and the speaker's present moment is already the child's "long ago". The poem becomes a letter posted ahead through time, written so that the kiss can be felt again by someone who didn't understand it the first time.
This is why the poem lasts despite its gentleness. A modern reader might expect so much tenderness to turn syrupy, but the speaker never demands pity or even understanding in the moment. The line "You are too young to know it now" is almost generous, allowing the child their ignorance. What the poem gives instead is a promise that the meaning will arrive later, and that when it does, it will arrive with grief. In under thirty lines it turns a bedtime kiss into a study of how love is only fully read in hindsight.