Before the first line has even started, the poem shouts a name at us. BIGHEAD sits alone in capitals, half cartoon nickname, half warning sign on a cage. We are never told what it is, and that withholding drives everything that follows. Resnick defines the creature only by what it does: it wars, it frightens, it screams, it spies, it pounds. We are left to decide what kind of thing could do all this.
The clues point toward the household. The poem mentions "furniture," tells someone to "close the door," and finally addresses "parents." On that evidence, the most natural reading is a child, perhaps a furious, uncontrollable one, seen through the eyes of frightened adults. But the poem never confirms this, and other readings stay open. It could be a rage, an obsession, or a madness that runs in a family. The title, "It Is Late," adds to the unease. It suggests an hour when the house is dark and the danger has already got in, or perhaps that it is too late to do anything about it. Both of those are inferences from the text, not facts the poem gives us.
The construction is bare. There is no rhyme, no punctuation, and no capital letter apart from the name, so the poem reads like a breathless warning shouted down a corridor. Almost every sentence begins with "it": "it can war," "it can make," "it is frightening," "it spys," "it is crazy." That drumbeat keeps the creature faceless, a pronoun where a person should be. The short lines also control the pace. In "it can war / with little pointed / cannibal teeth," the line breaks make us wait for the teeth. "War" is used as a verb, which feels strange and a little childlike. "Little" shrinks the teeth, yet "cannibal" makes them savage. That mix of nursery-sized and nightmare-sized runs through the whole poem. Even "make hairs of people spring" twists the familiar phrase about hair standing on end into something faintly comic.
Then comes the abrupt command "close the door," the only imperative in the poem. It breaks the list of descriptions with real panic. "It comes / screaming out of capture" raises a question the poem will not answer: who held it, and why? The phrase makes the creature sound like something kept in, not simply something wicked. Next, "it spys / smiling smiling lords" is the most ambiguous moment. The grammar allows the creature to be the one smiling, or the lords to be. The doubled "smiling" has a fixed, mechanical quality, like a grin that cannot stop. If the lords are figures of authority, the creature may see through their polite masks. That is only a reading, but it fits the sense that Bighead is dangerous partly because it is honest. Its fists "pound your furniture," and the "your" pulls the reader into the house with it.
The ending changes the poem's temperature. "Parents" stands alone on its line, like a name called across a room. Then comes the flat statement "it is crazy," and finally "it will break your hearts." Until now the threats were physical: teeth, fists, wrecked furniture. The last line moves the damage inside the body, to something that cannot be repaired with a locked door. Nobody breaks your heart unless you love them, so the final line quietly admits that the thing in the house is loved. The poem's fear and its tenderness arrive together.
That is what makes it worth reading. In about a dozen short lines it combines a playground nickname, a horror-film menace and a sorrowful family warning, and it never settles which tone is the true one. Because Resnick leaves "it" unexplained, we have to supply the meaning ourselves. Try reading Bighead as a child, as an illness, as anger, and see which readings the last line can survive. The poem is a small lesson in how much dread can be built from a pronoun, a few concrete objects, and one well-placed word: "hearts."