Fear is the first thing Watts puts on the page: "My God, how many are my fears!" The title shows that this is a reworking of Psalm 3, and the situation is that of someone hemmed in. Enemies multiply, and "conspiring my eternal death, / They break my present peace." The pairing of "eternal" with "present" shows what is at stake. The danger is not only bodily but spiritual, and the worst voice belongs to a "lying tempter" who insists that "my swelling sins appear / Too big to be forgiven." The central idea is that this despair can be answered, and the poem's proof is surprisingly ordinary: the speaker lies down and sleeps.
That moment sits at the poem's centre. "He shed soft slumbers on mine eyes, / In spite of all my foes; / I woke, and wondered at the grace / That guarded my repose." Nothing dramatic happens. The speaker simply wakes up safe and is amazed by it. Watts argues for trust by pointing to lived experience, and a night's rest becomes evidence. Once the speaker has woken, the tone changes. The "hosts of death and hell" are still "armed against me", but the next line dismisses them: "Terrors no more shall shake my soul."
The form is as plain as the argument. Each of the eight stanzas alternates lines of eight and six syllables in an iambic beat, with the second and fourth lines rhyming. This is the pattern known as common metre, the shape of countless hymns, and it suits a poem meant to be sung by many voices. The words are mostly single syllables, and the lines are short enough to be learned by heart. Within that simplicity some rhymes do real work. In the fourth stanza "ear" rhymes with "fear": God "bowed a list'ning ear" and "subdued my fear", so the answer to the cry sits in the sound itself. Near the end, "sing" rhymes with "sting", which puts the speaker's song next to death's defeat: "While I thy glory sing; / ... death has lost his sting."
The imagery gives the threat a body. Sins "swell" and are "too big", like something that has outgrown the space it was meant to fill. Guilt "threat'ning" is something God will "silence", and a "drooping head" will be lifted, so the cure for shame is a physical gesture. The enemy is also given a pointed shape. God will "on the tempter tread", and later "has broke the serpent's teeth". The serpent and the line about death losing its "sting" suggest, judging by the imagery, a Christian reading of the psalm, in which the speaker's private battle joins a much older struggle between God and evil. Watts makes death a creature whose weapons have been taken away.
His handling of pronouns is easy to miss. For seven stanzas the poem is intensely personal: "my God", "my fears", "my glory", "my soul", and then the neat reversal "My refuge is my God." The speaker even shifts between talking to God ("But thou, my glory") and talking about him ("from his holy hill / He bowed"), as if the prayer slides between confiding and testifying. Then the last stanza widens the circle. "Salvation to the Lord belongs; / His arm alone can save: / Blessings attend thy people here, / And reach beyond the grave." The lone sleeper becomes part of a community, and the final line pushes the poem's security past the limit of life itself.
Watts is remembered chiefly as a hymn writer, and this poem shows why that craft matters. It does not try to dazzle with ornament. It takes an experience everyone knows, lying awake under the weight of fear and guilt, and gives it words simple enough for a whole congregation to say as their own. Its power comes from the order of its movement, from cry to answer to sleep to wonder to shared blessing. Anyone who has felt that their worst thoughts were bigger than any comfort can recognise the "swelling sins" in the second stanza, and the quiet waking-up in the fifth is the poem's most persuasive moment.