Blame does a lot of quiet work in this short poem. A woman lies awake night after night, and she has an explanation ready: insomnia. By the second stanza the poem has politely taken that explanation away. Her sleeplessness, it says, is a symptom. What really keeps her up is a "troubled heart," and the last stanza admits she doesn't know whether she will ever be free of it. The central idea is that we often name our problems in a way that makes them easier to bear, and that a wrong name can be a way of not looking at the real thing.
The word "insomnia" is the first clue. It is clinical and tidy, the kind of label you might find in a doctor's notes. Set beside the plainer, warmer word "heart," it starts to sound like a cover story. Insomnia is something that happens to a person from outside, like weather, while a troubled heart is something she carries. The small "But" that opens stanza two is where the poem turns, and it turns gently. It doesn't scold her for blaming insomnia. It simply knows better.
The form supports this quiet tone. The poem is three two-line stanzas of free verse, with no rhyme to tie anything off neatly. The rhythm is more musical than it first seems, though. "Every night she lies awake" falls almost into a regular beat, EV-ery NIGHT she LIES a-WAKE, and "But it's her troubled heart" sways in much the same way. The effect is faintly like a lullaby, which is a sly irony in a poem about someone who can't sleep. Most lines run five or six syllables, and the fifth stretches a little longer as the wondering begins. Then the poem drops to a two-word last line, "Find peace." The sudden shortness feels like a breath let out, or like hope running out of room.
Several word choices reward a second look. "Lies awake" carries a faint pun: she lies in bed, but she may also be lying to herself, since the next stanza suggests her explanation isn't the whole truth. That is a reading rather than something the poem insists on, but the verb makes it available. "Restless" is normally a word for a body that can't settle, yet here it is handed to the heart, so the true insomniac is the heart rather than the woman. "Keeps" turns the heart into a kind of jailer, holding her in wakefulness. There is also an echo between "Every" in the first line and "ever" in the fifth. A phrase meaning each single night becomes a word meaning all of time, and the repeated sound quietly stretches her nights into something endless.
The final stanza is built from a fragment. "Wondering if she will ever / Find peace" has no subject of its own. It dangles from the sentence before, the way her thoughts have nowhere to land. There is no question mark either, though a question is exactly what is being asked. The doubt is reported rather than voiced, which gives the ending a flat, tired tone instead of a dramatic one. The line break leaves "ever" hanging for a moment before "Find peace" arrives with a soft hush of s sounds, the same whisper that runs through "she," "insomnia" and "restless." The thing she wants is almost audible in the poem's sound and still out of reach.
The title, "sleep," in lowercase, never appears in the body of the poem. It names what is missing. By the end "peace" has taken its place, and the two words blur: what she is chasing is not just a good night but relief from whatever troubles her. The poem also says "she," not "I." That might mean an observer who knows her well, or someone describing herself from arm's length. The poem doesn't say, and the ambiguity suits a subject where people so often hold their own feelings at a distance.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It offers no cause for the trouble, no cure and no consoling ending, only the precise observation that the label we choose for our pain can hide the pain itself. For anyone who has lain awake blaming a late coffee or a noisy street, that observation lands with quiet recognition.