A child goes looking for a playmate and finds him asleep in the daytime. At first the speaker simply watches, noticing the shut eyes and how he cannot lift the lids to see. But the longer the looking lasts, the more the sleeping child seems to change. He becomes less like a familiar friend and more like a cat or dog asleep, or something hidden behind a log in the woods.
That shift creates the poem’s quiet unease. The speaker feels that something inside the sleeping child is looking back, and it is not quite the person they know. Sleep has made someone familiar seem mysterious and unreachable, as if he belongs partly to another world. The ordinary room feels slightly wrong. The mood is not loud horror but a private, childish fear — strong enough to make the speaker leave the room without even saying the sleeping child’s name.