Sunandita's «SOP for sleep» announces itself in the language of the office. "SOP" stands for standard operating procedure, the dry, step-by-step instructions a workplace writes for tasks that must be done correctly every time. Bedtime is the last thing anyone would expect to find in such a manual, and the gap between that official title and the five small lines beneath it is where the poem's charm sits. Its central idea is that falling asleep is itself a craft, a ritual of small comforts that can be done well, and that the proof of success is the most unglamorous sound there is.
The poem follows its own procedure closely. Each line is a step: light the candles, enjoy the glow, let the scent spread, get into bed, fall asleep. The verbs march in order: "lit," "revelled," "slipped," "began." Yet the poem is not written as instructions. A real SOP would use commands ("Light a candle. Get into bed."), whereas this speaker reports in the past tense, in the first person: "I lit candles." The effect is that of someone who has quietly tested the method and can vouch for it. The official register is a joke the poem plays on itself, because the person following this procedure is not a technician but someone happily giving in to pleasure.
That pleasure is built from the senses. The scene opens on sight, with candles and "soft glow," then moves to smell with "vanilla aroma," then to touch as the speaker "slipped under covers." The adjective "wintry" matters here. It suggests cold outside, so the warmth of flame, sweetness and blankets feels earned, a small shelter. The word "revelled" is the funniest choice in the poem. It normally belongs to parties and festivals, and it is applied to a solitary person sitting in candlelight. The exaggeration is gentle and self-aware, but it also means the happiness is real: for this speaker, a quiet night is a celebration.
The sound and shape of the lines carry the same meaning. There is no end rhyme, and the poem sits in loose free verse, but the line lengths do something clever. The first two lines are fairly even, at about eight and seven syllables. Then line three stretches to around eleven: "As it's vanilla aroma slowly diffused." The long line, with its soft, drawn-out word "diffused," acts out the scent spreading through the room. After that the poem shrinks: "I slipped under covers" is shorter, and "And began to snore" shorter still. The lines taper the way consciousness does. A thread of s-sounds runs through the later lines, in "soft," "slowly," "slipped" and finally "snore," and it makes the poem sound like a hush settling over the room.
The ending is the real turn. After four lines of candlelight and sweet air, a reader might expect a dreamy, poetic closing image, perhaps stars or silence or peace. Instead we get a snore, a blunt, bodily and slightly comic sound. This does two things. It punctures any pretension, reminding us that this is a real person in a real bed. It also completes the joke of the title, since a snore is the one measurable result by which this "procedure" can be declared successful. The verb "began" is quietly neat too: the speaker does not even notice falling asleep, only the snoring that has already started, so the poem ends where the speaker's awareness does.
One small thing in the text as printed is the apostrophe in "it's vanilla aroma," where "its" would be standard. Read as a slip, it does not change the meaning, though it is worth noticing that "its soft glow" earlier also uses a singular pronoun after the plural "candles." The flames blur into a single warm light, which suits a poem about letting details soften.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. In five lines it takes a tiny, ordinary experience and gives it shape, humour and a sense of care. It suggests that rest does not need to be dramatic, and that looking after yourself can be a deliberate, almost professional act. Its humour keeps that idea from becoming sentimental, and its form lets the reader slow down, relax, and drift off along with the speaker.