Christmas should be the season of togetherness, and Meredith opens this poem with a small social humiliation that exposes how far apart two people have come. The house is full, so the couple are given "an attic-crib," and the host's assumption, "Such lovers will not fret / At that, it is half-said," hangs in the air. The couple are expected to be lovers, and the speaker has to play the part. Meredith sets two kinds of knocking against each other. Downstairs "the great carouse / Knocks hard upon the midnight's hollow door," a noisy, careless merriment, while the speaker knocks at "hers" and sees only "the pit." The repeated verb makes the contrast cruel: the party gets in easily, but he is shut out of the room that should be most intimate. "Hollow" suggests an emptiness behind the festivities, and perhaps behind the marriage.
The poem is numbered XXIII, so it belongs to a larger sequence, and its form is distinctive. It has sixteen lines rather than the usual fourteen of a sonnet, arranged as four quatrains that each rhyme *abba*: house / get / fret / carouse, then door / pit / fit / floor, and so on. This enclosed rhyme scheme circles back on itself instead of moving forward, which suits a man pacing a small space and going over the same wound. The metre is basically iambic pentameter, but Meredith breaks it when emotion spikes. "Come, Shame, burn to my soul! and Pride, and Pain" is chopped by commas into near-separate stresses, so the line sounds less like smooth verse than like someone muttering through clenched teeth.
That outburst is the most revealing moment. Shame, Pride and Pain are capitalised and turned into "foul demons," but notice that Pride is on the list. The speaker does not simply blame the other person; he admits that his own stubbornness helps to torture him. The line "Why did I come here in that dullard fit?" shows the same self-reproach, and his bed on the floor ("I enter, and lie couched upon the floor") looks like both penance and exile. The sound that interrupts him, "the coverlet's quick beat," is intriguing. Judging by the words alone, it suggests bedclothes stirring with agitation, perhaps even a heartbeat, so that her distress is implied without a single word from her. The command "enchain!" is also ambiguous: it could mean binding the demons, or being bound by them.
Then the poem looks outside. "Out in the freezing darkness the lambs bleat. / The small bird stiffens in the low starlight." These two lines say nothing about the couple directly, yet they are the coldest in the poem. The creatures are small, helpless and exposed, and "stiffens" hints at a body giving up against the frost. Nature here works as an image of the speaker's emotional state: vulnerable, chilled and unsheltered, despite being inside a crowded house.
The final three lines shift the poem into a different register. "I know not how, but shuddering as I slept" admits that the speaker has no control over what comes next. In the dream, "a banished angel" creeps to him, a phrase that casts the woman as someone once heavenly and now cast out, though the poem does not say by whom. Her gesture is strange and beautifully humble: "My feet were nourished on her breasts all night." Feet, the lowliest part of the body, are warmed and "nourished," a word with a faint maternal feel, as though he is a child being fed and comforted. The shuddering gives way to warmth, and the long monosyllabic last line ends with "night," which closes the poem in something like peace.
The poem is significant because it refuses to make marital unhappiness simple. There is no villain, only shame, pride, longing and tenderness tangled together. The comfort arrives only in sleep, so the reader is left wondering whether the dream is a mercy or a cruelty, since the speaker must wake to the same cold room. That ambiguity, together with the way Meredith makes a crowded house and a freezing night feel like the two halves of one loneliness, gives the poem its lasting force.