Six lines, three couplets, and a whole theory of sleep and memory packed inside them. The title, "Replay," sets the scene. It sounds like the instant replay in a sports broadcast, where the action is run again so we can finally see what happened. Here the broadcaster is the night. While we sleep, it works away at an "extraordinary past," and the poem's central claim is that we lived through that past without really being present for it. The second couplet turns to us, almost impatiently: "see how much of it we have / but took no notice of." The past is ours, a possession, and we barely looked at it.
The word "industry" does a lot in the opening line. Night is imagined as a factory on the late shift, labouring, with nobody watching, to assemble dreams or memories from the day's raw material. Industry suggests effort, but also something mechanical and unromantic. Then comes "extraordinary," the longest word in the poem, stretching the line out. Its parts are worth noticing: *extra* and *ordinary*. The past that night works so hard on may be extraordinary only because it was once ordinary, a run of days that felt like nothing at the time. The poem hints that the ordinary is where the wonder was hiding all along.
The way the poem is built suits this idea. There is no rhyme, no punctuation, and not a single capital letter. The lines drift into one another like thoughts at the edge of sleep. The rhythm is loose and conversational, with no fixed metre, and the pace shifts according to the vocabulary. The early lines carry long, many-syllabled words ("industry," "extraordinary"), while the final couplet is almost entirely monosyllables: "we who miss not having any heart / and wake up dead." The poem gets plainer and harder as it goes, and the last three words land like footsteps stopping.
The line break after "took no notice of" deserves attention. The line ends on a bare preposition, with nothing for "of" to attach to, so the grammar hangs open. That is exactly what the line describes: a failure to attend, a sentence that does not reach its object. The reader feels the not-noticing happen in the syntax.
The final couplet is the most puzzling, and probably meant to be. "We who miss not having any heart" can be read in more than one way. "Miss" might mean long for, so that we feel the absence of a heart. It might mean fail to notice, so that we do not even register that we lack one. Both readings fit a poem about missing things. Either way the heart, the organ of feeling and attention, is what the speaker says is missing from daily life. The closing line, "wake up dead," is a small shock because waking is supposed to be the opposite of death. Judging by the logic of the poem, the suggestion is that sleep is where the past comes alive, while the waking hours are where we move through our lives numbly, without hearts, and fail to collect what we are given.
The pronoun matters too. The poem never says "I." It speaks as "we," including the reader in the charge and in the loss. The tone is not accusing so much as stunned, like someone pointing out a thing everyone shares and nobody has quite faced.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It does not explain or console, and it offers no advice about paying more attention, though the advice is implied. It sets an image (night at work), a paradox (an extraordinary past we ignored), and a reversal (waking as dying) side by side and trusts the reader to feel the connection. A short poem like this can be read in ten seconds and still go on working afterwards, which is something the poem's own subject, the past we have but did not notice, quietly asks of us.