Nobody goes through a box of keepsakes lightly, and Eugene Field's speaker doesn't either. The poem opens with an inventory, "I count my treasures o'er with care," and "care" does double duty. It means gentleness, the way you handle something breakable, but it also means sorrow. The three treasures are small and a little shabby: a toy, a sock "of faded hue," a lock of golden hair. Only gradually do we understand why a parent is counting them at Christmas. The child who owned them has died, though the poem never says the word.
What follows is unusual for a poem of loss. Instead of mourning at once, the speaker goes backward and gives each object its history. The toy is what the boy asked Santa for, the stocking is where he hung it, and the hair belongs to the "little golden-head" on the parent's knee. The scene is domestic and tender: the child "robed in white," lisping his prayer, toddling to the chimney-place. In the morning he comes back "with rapturous face" and finds "this little treasure there." Stanzas five and seven share their key words (prayer, chimney-place, toddled, there), so the happy morning is told twice, almost like a ritual. That is how grief tends to work, replaying the one scene it cannot lose.
Then the angels arrive, and the poem's real subject appears. In stanza six they come "with singing to our lowly home / And kiss my darling as he slept." It sounds like a blessing, though "lengthening shadows crept" already darkens it, as does the child's "mournful" eyes earlier. Two stanzas later comes the line the whole poem has been leaning toward: "They came again one Christmas-tide." The same "angel host, so fair and white" returns, and this time they "lured my darling from my side." "Lured" is the sharpest word here, since it hints at theft inside the comfort. The child's white robe also begins to look like a rehearsal for the angels' white wings. The visitors who answered his prayer are the ones who take him, so the gift and the wound have one source.
The form carries this quietly. Every one of the ten stanzas rhymes ABBA, with the outer lines wrapped around an inner pair, like keepsakes in tissue paper. The meter is a steady, nursery-like iambic tetrameter, and it never stumbles, even in the stanza of loss. That restraint is deliberate. Death gets four lines, and the poem keeps its composure around them. The chiming rhymes echo the "merry Christmas chime" of stanza two, so the sound of the verse is itself Christmas music.
Stanza nine is the most striking. It returns to the opening list, but now it has no verbs: "A little sock, a little toy, / A little lock of golden hair, / The Christmas music on the air, / A watching for my baby boy!" Grief shrinks to a string of nouns. The word "little," which has tagged nearly every object, now sounds almost helpless, and the list ends with "a watching," meaning a vigil kept year after year.
The last stanza turns that vigil into hope. "Golden-head" now stands for the whole boy, as if the keepsake had grown back into the child. The speaker imagines the angel train coming a third time, "to bear me to Eternity," and the final line, "My watching will not be in vain," answers the waiting with a promise. The consolation is plainly Christian, but the feeling comes from the objects, not the doctrine.
Dated 1879, the poem sits in a tradition of sentimental verse about childhood, home and faith, and a modern reader may find its sweetness heavy. Still, the construction is careful. A list becomes a story, a story becomes a loss, and a loss becomes a reason to go on watching. It shows how plain words and a tight rhyme scheme can hold a private sorrow without letting it spill over.