Every stanza of "The Dead of the Night" begins with the same line, yet the speaker never ends a stanza in quite the same place. That tension between repetition and change drives the whole poem. On the surface it is about missing someone. In the deepest hour of darkness, thoughts of an absent "he" crowd in and keep the speaker awake. The poem never says who he is or why he is gone. Judging by the phrase "love and want", he is someone deeply loved, and the vagueness lets any reader fit their own absence into the gap. The central idea is that longing can torment and console at once. The thing that keeps the speaker from sleep turns out to be the thing that finally allows it.
The word "haunting" appears twice, in the first and fourth stanzas, and it is a surprising choice. Hauntings belong to ghosts and fear, and the word "dead" in the refrain nudges the mood that way. Yet the visitors here are "single whispers" that "dance", and their words are "delicate" and "kind". "Single" may simply mean individual, but it also quietly suggests solitude, as if each whisper arrives alone, like the speaker. The ghost in this poem is a memory that behaves like a guest.
The second stanza is the most honest moment. "His eyes gaze at me" is followed by a flat, almost clinical correction: "I know he is not here." The explanation that follows, "It is only my heart trying to see", hands the job of seeing from the eyes to the heart. The speaker cannot look at him, so feeling has to do the looking. A few lines later the eyes are shut "tight", which suggests the speaker is holding the image in rather than keeping it out.
The rhyme is simple but pays attention to detail. In every stanza the second and fourth lines rhyme: mind/kind, me/see, him/swim, smile/while. The third stanza goes further, because "night", "tight" and "right" all rhyme. The refrain word is echoed twice, so the darkness, the shut eyes and the reassurance of "all that makes things all right" are tied together by sound. That is also the stanza where the central contradiction shows. Sleep "does not come easy" because of him, yet he is what makes everything "all right". The one imperfect pairing, "haunt" and "want", falls in the stanza that names the feeling as "bittersweet". The slightly off sound matches the mixed emotion, though this may be a happy accident rather than a deliberate effect.
The rhythm is loose and close to speech. The refrain, "In the dead of the night", has a gentle two-beat sway, almost like rocking. Around it the lines vary a good deal. "His eyes gaze at me" is short and plain, while "When he is all that makes things all right" runs on and stretches past the lines near it. The poem makes no attempt at strict meter, and that suits a mind drifting through its thoughts at night. The repeated opening line works like the ticking of a clock, and each stanza marks another stretch of the same sleepless hour.
The real movement of the poem lies in its verbs. The speaker begins by being acted upon, with thoughts that "haunt" and "continue to haunt". By the fifth stanza the speaker is the one acting: "I wish to see him." The memory of "his smile, laugh, and embrace" makes the mind "swim", a lovely word choice. A mind that was haunted now floats, dizzy with pleasure, as though the dark were water instead of a threat. By the last stanza the refrain has changed its meaning. The same words that opened on a haunting now frame a speaker who "fall[s] asleep with a smile".
The final couplet is pleasingly ambiguous. "To see him, / It will only be a night's while" could mean he will appear in a dream. It could also mean that reunion is close, only a night away. Either reading makes the night a bridge to him and no longer a barrier. The phrase "a night's while" is slightly unusual, and it may have been shaped partly by the need to rhyme with "smile", but it still leaves the poem on a note of calm.
The poem is not complicated, and its strength lies in that plainness. It takes a familiar experience, lying awake and thinking of someone who is not there, and shows how repeating one line can chart a change of feeling from restlessness to peace. Anyone who has lain awake missing someone will recognise it, and the comfort it finds is earned by the stanzas that come before.