For most of its length, "It Is He" reads like a thriller told by the victim. A figure stalks the speaker's nights, turns up in daylight, haunts dreams and causes screams. Only in the final line does the poem name him: misery. The whole poem is a delayed riddle, and the payoff is that the pursuer is a feeling rather than a person. Its central idea is that misery is not a visitor who arrives and leaves but a lifelong companion, one that wounds, shapes and eventually belongs to everybody.
The construction is very simple. The first eight lines all begin with "He," a drumbeat that makes the figure feel inescapable. Look at what happens to the speaker in those lines: "my nights," "my dreams," "my tears," "me." The speaker is only ever the object of the sentence, while "he" does all the acting. The verbs come from horror and crime: "stalked," "haunted," "found." Even the tenses close in. The poem begins in the past ("stalked," "haunted"), moves to "He's followed me for all my years," and then settles into the present ("breaks," "makes"). By the time we reach the present tense, the haunting is not over.
Then comes the poem's most interesting pair of lines: "He breaks my soul / He makes me whole." Neither line cancels the other. The speaker admits that misery has become part of who they are: "I don't know who I'd be without him." This is where the horror story turns uneasy. A stalker is something you escape, but here the speaker has grown around the thing that follows them. The next line shows how far that goes. The speaker takes control of the grammar for the first time ("I've decided") and answers misery by making a "hymn." A hymn is a song of praise, usually sung by a group, so the word carries a bitter irony. It also carries a sound-joke, because "him" and "hymn" are pronounced the same. The rhyme turns the person into the song.
Most of the rhymes are tidy couplets: nights/daylight, dreams/screams, tears/years, soul/whole, alone/home, ways/days. They give the poem a nursery-rhyme chime that sits oddly against the dark subject, as if misery were being made singable. "Waits" and "break" are only a loose match, sharing a vowel more than a full rhyme. The lines are short and plain at first, then stretch ("He comes in the most unsuall ways") as the speaker moves from litany to explanation. The poem has no punctuation and a few spelling slips ("your" for "you're," "unsuall"). Whether or not that was deliberate, it gives the poem a spoken, unpolished quality, like a confession said quickly before the nerve goes.
The second half widens the lens. "But he isn't for me alone / He finds everyone at home" is the key shift. Home is where we expect safety, and misery gets in there too. The line "he comes when your on break" is cleverly placed. It means misery arrives when we relax, but it also echoes the earlier "He breaks my soul," so the same word covers both rest and ruin. Then comes the sunshine: "the sunniest of days." The weather contrast is a familiar one, but it makes the point that misery does not wait for a reason.
One small change of pronoun carries a lot: "At one point or another you will meet him / But everyday I greet him." The reader will "meet" misery, a first encounter. The speaker "greets" him, which is what you do with someone who turns up every day. The verb shows the speaker's long familiarity with misery, and perhaps a kind of weary politeness.
The poem's strength lies in that withheld answer and in its honesty. By giving misery a body, a gender and a habit of showing up uninvited, it makes an abstract word frightening, then strangely intimate. The question "Who is he" hangs without a question mark, and the reply, "You know him by the name of misery," is quiet and almost gentle. The speaker is not claiming to have defeated him, only to have found a way to sing about him. In turning private suffering into a shared hymn, the poem suggests that naming misery, and admitting that everyone meets it, is one way of living alongside it.