The poem starts with a simple, almost dreamlike picture: a blank, white emptiness in which the speaker notices a book. It sounds like the opening of a story, which fits the title. But the expected order of things flips in the second stanza. When the speaker goes to look inside the book, it is reading them instead. The reader becomes the thing being read.
The last stanza folds the whole scene into a bedroom, a "white chamber" where the speaker goes to sleep. That suggests the white nothing and the white page may be the same as the room, or perhaps the speaker's own mind falling into sleep or dream. The book and the bed blur together, like a bedtime story that swallows the listener.
The mood is quiet, strange, and a little unsettling. Nothing is dramatic, yet the speaker seems small, watched, and slightly lost. The poem leaves us with the feeling that stories do something to us as much as we do something with them.