The speaker remembers lying in a warm, firelit room with someone exhausted, the two of them whispering like children and drifting in and out of sleep. There’s real tenderness in the scene—the great white bed, the soft voices, the playful moment when each insists they are not sleepy. But the memory turns stranger and colder. While the other person sleeps, the speaker slips to the window and watches sheep moving through snow. That image outside becomes inner: thoughts arrive like a shivering flock, led by fear. The final stanza wonders whether this happened a thousand years ago or yesterday, as if the closeness is both distant and still vivid. The warmth of the room and the cold of the snow sit side by side, making the memory feel intimate and dreamlike, but shadowed by loneliness and quiet unease.
Sleeping Together — Summary
Sleeping together ... how tired you were ... How warm our room ... how the firelight spread On walls and ceiling and great white bed! We spoke in whispers as children do, And now it was I--and then it was you Slept a moment, to wake--“My dear, I’m not at all sleepy,” one of us said...
Was it a thousand years ago? I woke in your arms--you were sound asleep-- And heard the pattering sound of sheep. Softly I slipped to the floor and crept To the curtained window, then, while you slept, I watched the sheep pass by in the snow.
O flock of thoughts with their shepherd Fear Shivering, desolate, out in the cold, That entered into my heart to fold! A thousand years ... was it yesterday When we, two children of far away, Clinging close in the darkness, lay Sleeping together?... How tired you were...