The poem sketches a place of near-total isolation. The title, "High and lonesome," sets the tone, and the first two lines make it concrete: there's no guest, no old lady. Nobody visits, and nobody is around to keep house or keep company. The speaker doesn't complain about this. The plain, flat statements, with the dropped "g" and the "ain't," sound like someone simply reporting how things are.
The second stanza shifts from absence to a strange kind of routine. You sleep all day, then something wakes you: drums in the night. The poem never says whose drums they are or what they mean, and that gap is part of the effect. They could be music, a ritual, or just a sound carried across the dark. The mood is quiet, a little eerie, and oddly calm. The speaker seems used to the solitude, maybe even comfortable in it, while the drums hint that something is still alive out there beyond the silence.