Elizabeth Madox Roberts, a Kentucky-born poet and novelist, published “A Child Asleep” in her 1922 collection Under the Tree. That book gathers short poems rooted in the daily life and language of rural Kentucky children. Rather than treating childhood as simply sweet, Roberts often lets a child’s gaze uncover something uncanny. In this lyric, a young speaker hunts for a playmate, finds him napping at an odd hour, and ends up backing away without a word. The poem traces that quiet turn from expectation to fear.
The speaker’s first words are plain: “I looked for him everywhere / Because I wanted him to play.” Finding the boy asleep “but it was day” is already a small violation of the expected order. The child watches the shut eyes, noticing that “he couldn’t lift them up to see.” Then the poem’s key line arrives: “And something in him looked at me.” The boy himself is not looking; the playmate seems absent, replaced by an inward presence. The speaker reaches for comparisons to make sense of this: the sleeping child is a little like a cat or dog, then like “a thing that’s in the woods / All day behind a log.” The shift from familiar pets to a hidden creature in the woods matters. It moves the boy from the warm house into a wilder place, turning him from a person into an “it,” a thing that sleeps in concealment.
Roberts shapes this experience in short ballad-like stanzas, with second and fourth lines rhyming—play/day, see/me, dog/log, there/stair. That singsong frame feels like a nursery rhyme, which makes the disturbance underneath it more striking. The rhythm stays close to speech, as if a child is recalling the moment and still sorting through it. Small repeated words carry the mystery. The word “something” appears first in “something in him looked at me” and later in “something that was sleeping there.” The speaker cannot name the fear, and Roberts refuses to explain it. The word “behind” works similarly, appearing in “behind the lids” and “behind a log.” Both phrases point to a hidden place, a boundary the speaker cannot pass.
The last stanza isolates the speaker’s fear. “I didn’t even say his name” is the poem’s most revealing line: naming might have called the playmate back from that strange state, but the speaker cannot risk it. Instead, the child leaves the room and “came down the stair,” a descent that is both physical and emotional. The poem is significant because it uses a child’s limited vocabulary to reveal a difficult truth about identity. A person is recognizable partly because he looks back, responds, and answers to a name. In sleep, that recognition disappears. What remains is a breathing body, familiar and yet not. Roberts captures the moment when a child first senses that the people we love can become strangers behind their own closed eyes.