Late at night, the speaker lies in bed and finds that the darkness outside is seeping into their mind. The poem opens by calling the night both beautiful and terrifying, a black-and-white picture that is lovely to look at but hard to be alone with. The heavy sheets become a physical sign of an emotional weight: the body feels as burdened as the heart.
In the second stanza, the sunset is "far behind" and dawn is still a long way off, so the speaker is stuck in the emptiest stretch of the night. Here, "demons" whisper inside their head, which suggests anxious or self-critical thoughts they can't switch off. The last stanza is the bleakest. A "bright soul" sits and rots, hinting that someone who seems full of life is wearing away in private. The closing lines tie sky and thoughts together: as the night darkens, so does the speaker's mood. The overall feeling is quiet, heavy, and lonely.