Anyone who has met a newborn, or a parent of one, will recognize the situation sketched in "Paging Morpheus" by De Von Grady Hough. A father has been conscripted into round-the-clock service, and the poem is his short, groggy dispatch from the front. Its central idea is simple and honest: becoming a parent means surrendering your sleep, and the only sane response is to laugh about it, even while you stagger.
The title does much of the work before the first line begins. Morpheus is the Greek god of dreams, and "paging" him borrows the language of hospitals and hotel lobbies, where someone is summoned over a loudspeaker. The joke is that the speaker is begging for sleep the way you might call for a doctor in an emergency. It also quietly reverses the poem's own situation: the baby is the one paging him, and so the speaker, in desperation, pages the god who never answers.
That sense of being summoned runs through the first stanza. "The order calls for attention" is a wonderfully stiff, bureaucratic phrase for a crying infant. The baby is not a baby here but an "order," something issued from above and demanding compliance, as if the speaker had been drafted. The list of times that follows, "At ten, at two, at five," gives the demands a clockwork regularity, and the speaker's weariness shows in the next line: "And so frequently in between." The rhythm sags and spreads there, the line running longer and looser than the tidy times before it. The schedule, we feel, has collapsed. The nights are not a series of neat wake-ups but one continuous interruption.
Then comes the exclamation "Good gracious sakes alive!" It is an old-fashioned, almost grandmotherly expression, and the choice is funny precisely because it is so mild. A man at the end of his rope might be expected to curse; instead he reaches for a phrase from a much gentler era. Perhaps that is part of the point. Fatherhood has made him suddenly older, a member of the generation that says "sakes alive," and he is startled by his own voice. It also keeps the tone affectionate. The poem never turns bitter about the child. Its exasperation is the loving kind.
The second stanza moves from the baby's demands to the speaker's body. "Bleary-eyed, I stumble out, / Though I can barely creep" contains a small, clever contradiction. To stumble is to move clumsily and quickly; to creep is to move slowly and quietly. He cannot manage even the slower of the two, which tells us how little energy is left. The word "creep" also suggests the careful tiptoeing of a parent trying not to wake a child, so there may be a double meaning: he is too tired to move, and too anxious about noise to try.
The final couplet delivers the poem's one plain statement of identity: "I'm just a brand new papa now, / In need of one night's sleep." The word "papa" is tender and slightly unexpected, warmer than "father" or "dad," and "brand new" makes the whole ordeal sound like a product still in its wrapper. The small word "just" is telling, too. He is only a new papa, as if that explained everything, and for anyone who has been through it, it does. The last line is modest to the point of pathos. He does not ask for a vacation or a miracle, only "one night's sleep."
Structurally, the poem is tidy: two quatrains with an ABCB rhyme scheme, where "five" rhymes with "alive" and "creep" with "sleep." The short, bouncy lines have the feel of a nursery rhyme, which is fitting. The poem borrows the sing-song form of a lullaby while describing the very thing that keeps lullabies from working on the one singing them.
What makes it worth reading is that gentle irony. It takes a universal experience, ordinary and unglamorous, and treats it with warmth and a light comic touch, reminding us that small poems can hold real feeling.