Four short lines, and one joke that keeps getting funnier the longer you look at it. "Paradox" takes two of the most ordinary phrases in English, "night is falling" and "day is breaking," and treats them with absurd literal-mindedness. If night is always falling, why has it never been hurt? If day is always breaking, why has it never been broken? The poem's central idea is that language quietly runs on pictures we never stop to examine, and that a little playful pressure can make those pictures wobble.
The cleverness lies in how neatly the logic is turned inside out. Night "consistently" falls, yet "has no record of breaking at all." Day "forever is breaking," yet "has never as yet had a fall." The speaker is, in effect, a pedant with a sense of humour, asking the sort of question a child might ask about an idiom and then refusing to let it go. We expect something that falls to break, and something that breaks to have fallen. Instead, the two verbs are split between the two halves of the day, and neither ever catches up with the other. Falling and breaking are cause and effect in the real world; here they pass each other like people on opposite sides of a street.
The structure underlines that symmetry. The poem is one short stanza of two balanced halves: lines one and two give us night, lines three and four give us day. Even the sentence shapes mirror each other, each half opening with a subject ("The night," "But the day") and then interrupting itself with a clause set off by commas ("though consistently falling," "which forever is breaking"). That pairing makes the poem feel like a small logical proof, a couplet of couplets, which suits a piece called "Paradox."
The rhythm is light and bouncy, built on a loose, galloping beat in which stresses come roughly every third syllable ("The NIGHT, though conSISTently FALLing"). It reads aloud like a nursery rhyme or a comic limerick with the edges sanded down, and that sing-song quality is part of the point: the tone is breezy, not solemn, so the puzzle arrives as a game rather than a lecture. The rhyme scheme is also worth noticing. Only lines two and four rhyme ("at all" and "a fall"), while "falling" and "breaking" in the first and third lines are left unanswered. That leaves the poem pleasantly lopsided: the rhymes land on the words that carry the punchline, and the final word, "fall," is the very word the whole joke has been circling.
The key words repay a closer look. "Consistently" and "forever" are the heavy-handed adverbs that give the poem its mock-scientific air, as though the speaker had been keeping careful records. Indeed, "record" is the funniest word in the text: night "has no record of breaking," as if there were a ledger somewhere, a case file on the sky's injuries. Then comes "as yet" in the last line, a small hedge that suggests the speaker is open to being proved wrong. There is a gentle comedy in that caution, a scholar leaving the door ajar for future evidence.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. Poets have always personified night and day, and idioms like these are so worn that we hear them as dead metaphors, background noise. This poem wakes them up. By taking "falling" and "breaking" at face value, it shows how much of what we say depends on images we agree not to question, and it reminds us that a paradox is not always a grand philosophical riddle. Sometimes it is just a phrase that stops making sense the moment you stare at it. The poem also leaves a faint afterimage: day and night as two figures locked in an endless cycle, one forever tumbling, the other forever cracking open, and neither ever coming to harm. That is oddly comforting, and it is a lot of feeling to pack into four lines.