Night usually turns up in poems as a mood. Here it turns up as an address. Three times the speaker opens the same door, "In the house of night," and each time we step into a different room. The repeated phrase works like a refrain, but it also fixes the poem's central conceit: night is a place with furniture, rafters, windows and eaves, and everything we fear, make and lose happens under its roof.
The first stanza sets the tone with a mix of the whimsical and the unsettling. A "blue bear" reads "the screenplay for your dreams," which makes dreaming a production with a script and a bear for a story editor. The verb "pores over" quietly puns on "pours," a hint of the liquid, nocturnal work to come. Then the mood shifts. "Somebody's bad heart wrinkles / like a sack of cheese tied to the rafters" is a startling simile, comic and a little disgusting. The vague "somebody" makes the heart sound overheard, as if night were full of other people's ailments, and the heart becomes a thing stored in a larder, curing and shrivelling. The stanza then closes on its shortest line. "I dreamed that I was lucid-dreaming, / and then I was" folds the dream back on itself, and the plain, almost shrugging "and then I was" suggests that in this house wanting something and having it can be the same act.
The second stanza turns to making and faith. Ink and "midnight oil" never run low, which takes a tired phrase for working late and treats it as a literal stockpile, so the house is an endlessly supplied study. Then "Bed-time prayers flutter out / through a cross-shaped window," and the verb "flutter" prepares the comparison that follows: they are "anachronistic as bats on a winter day." The image is exact. A bat in winter daylight is doubly out of place, and the speaker seems to say that bedtime prayer is just as out of step with the modern world, yet still alive and still flying. Then comes a bodily note. A spider's "mild poison" spreads "a dark delta down one thigh." The alliteration of "dark delta" lets the bruise take on the shape of a river mouth, so a small injury looks like geography. It is the poem's quietest piece of menace.
The final stanza widens the scale and makes the poem's most serious claim: "every time / a clock stops, some unloved language / or species dies in its sleep." The word "unloved" carries the weight. Extinction here comes from neglect, not catastrophe, and the phrase "dies in its sleep" makes it gentle and unnoticed, which is perhaps the point. Having moved from one stopped heart to whole vanished languages, the poem ends on a joke. A nightjar "blows its lid," a nice double sense of a bird's sudden call and the idiom for losing one's temper, and the bogeyman "jumps, an obvious fraud." The traditional night terror is startled by a bird. Even the eaves are "parchment," so the house is partly built from writing material, an echo of the screenplay and the ink earlier on.
Formally the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular metre. Its music comes from repetition, from enjambments that delay the key word ("neither ink / nor midnight oil"), and from the contrast between long, winding sentences and sudden short ones. The ampersand in "& the bogeyman jumps" gives the last stanza a hurried, offhand look, as though the speaker were dismissing the monster in passing.
The poem matters for how it balances its tones. Wit and grief usually take turns, but here they share a single sentence. It suggests that the imagination at night is inexhaustible, with plenty of ink, scripts and lucid dreams, while living things and languages are fragile and can vanish without a sound. The imagined fears are frauds, and the real losses are the ones that go quietly. That is a surprising and rather moving way to describe sleeplessness.