Two lines are all amone gives us, and the first is an order from someone in no position to enforce it: wake me. The speaker is asleep, or about to be, and is asking another person for one specific favour. The second line explains why: "before you see the last of me." The poem names no one, gives no place, and never says who is leaving. Judging by the text alone, it could be a parting at dawn, a farewell at a bedside, or a relationship quietly ending. The vagueness is deliberate. What stays constant is the wish at the centre: the speaker wants to be present for their own ending and refuses to be left while unconscious.
The phrase "see the last of me" is where the poem does its quiet work. In everyday speech, "I've seen the last of him" usually means good riddance. Here the idiom is turned around and made tender, because the speaker wants that final seeing to happen while they can look back. A sleeping person is seen but cannot see, and in that sense is already half absent. To be watched while asleep is to be turned into an object. The speaker asks to stay a person, someone whose eyes can meet the other's. There is a second meaning in "the last of me," which could also be the final remnant, whatever is left once everything else has gone. That turns a person into a quantity that can run out, and it makes the sleeper's request more urgent.
The sound and shape of the lines support this. The first is three syllables, the second eight, so the poem begins in a clipped command and then stretches into a longer, softer breath. The rhythm is worth hearing. "Wake me" falls from a stress to an unstress, like a tap on the shoulder. The second line is a run of four steady rising beats: be-FORE you SEE the LAST of ME. It is so regular that it feels like a sentence the speaker has rehearsed. It also lands its heaviest stress on the final word, so the line climbs towards "me," as though the whole poem were leaning toward the self.
That word is also the poem's only rhyme, if we can call it that. Both lines end on "me," an identical rhyme with no variation. The poem opens on a command about "me" and closes on the same word, which gives it an enclosed, circular feel, as if the speaker were fenced in by their own pronoun. The long "ee" sound repeated in "me," "see" and "me" is open and drawn out, close to a sigh or a plea. It softens what could have been a harsh instruction.
There is almost no imagery in the usual sense, and that restraint is part of the effect. We are never shown a bed, a window or a door, yet we sense all three. Sleep, sight and a threshold are implied by "wake," "see" and "before." That last word matters most. It sets up a deadline, so time is already running out as the poem begins. The speaker knows something is coming and is afraid not of the event itself but of missing it.
The formal choices pull in the same direction. Everything is lowercase, and there is no punctuation, not even a full stop. "Wake me" has no exclamation mark, so it reads as a plea more than a demand, and the missing full stop leaves the request hanging in the air, unanswered. The title is only three asterisks, a common way of marking an untitled poem. We are dropped into the middle of a moment with no frame around it.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it asks the reader to supply. Because we are told so little, each of us fills the gap with our own sleepers and leavers, and the poem works just as well for any of them. Its insight is a small, true one: the hardest part of an ending may be not the loss but being denied the chance to take part in it. In eleven words, it argues that a goodbye is something two people should be awake for.