Almost everyone has done what the first stanza of "Remembrance" describes: woken in the small hours, frightened by a dream, and groped for something solid. Elizabeth von Schonberg begins with a question, "Do you remember", and the speaker is not interrogating the reader so much as inviting them back into a bedroom they have already lived in. A child wakes "startled and afraid," a hand goes out and finds "some familiar thing," and the fear drains away. The poem then widens its lens. Adults, it argues, do exactly the same thing. We have simply swapped the toy for something less tangible.
The poem's central idea lies in that parallel. The second stanza opens with "Time, perchance, has brought maturity," a modest, almost shrugging line, and then turns on the word "But." Growing up, the speaker suggests, has not cured us of the need for comfort; it has only changed what we reach for. The "midnight moments of our lives" are no longer literal nights but the bad stretches of adult experience, and what steadies us is "a memory / Of some golden yesterday." The consolation, in other words, is borrowed from the past to pay for the future: the memory "gives to our tomorrows / Fresh courage, hope and cheer."
One of the quietest and most interesting touches is the poem's honesty about what comfort can and cannot do. The first stanza ends with the admission that "the night / Were no more bright / Than it had been before." The toy does not turn on the lights or chase the dream away. The child sleeps better only because of what the object means, the remembered "play-time hours" and the hope of "sunny days to come." Comfort, the poem implies, lives in the mind rather than in the world, and the darkness stays exactly as dark as it was. That makes the consolation feel earned rather than sentimental.
Formally, the poem is free verse. There is no regular rhyme scheme and no fixed metre, and the lines vary in length, from the clipped "And wakened from some troubled dream" to the longer, more winding "In stillest, darkest hour of the night." This irregularity suits the subject. The poem moves like a thought drifting through half-sleep, and its rhythm loosens and tightens the way a child's breathing might. Yet rhyme does appear at the key moments. "Bright" and "night" chime at the end of the first stanza, and the closing "cheer" and "dear" lock together in the last lines, so that the poem seems to settle into rhyme exactly as the speaker settles into comfort. The final line, "So dear it is—so dear!", breaks its own syntax with a dash and a repeated word, as if emotion has overtaken grammar.
The imagery rewards a closer look. Almost everything in the first stanza is physical and small: a "childish hand," a "sleep flushed cheek," a "warm pillow." These are the details of touch, and the poem keeps returning to that sense. The verbs "reached out" and "touch" in the first stanza are echoed by "reach out still / To touch" in the second, a deliberate repetition that stitches child and adult together. By the end, though, the thing touched has become intangible, and the speaker "clasp[s] it for a moment to our hearts." The phrase "for a moment" is telling. The comfort is real but brief, and we will need to reach again.
Word choice adds to the effect. "Mayhap" and "perchance" give the poem a slightly old-fashioned, gentle tone, and the abbreviated "tho't" and "Altho" suggest a voice that is informal and personal rather than grand. Nothing here is showy. The vocabulary of "dear," "sweet," "golden" and "content" is plain and warm, and that plainness is the point.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to treat comfort as childish. It takes a universal, slightly embarrassing habit, clinging to something familiar when we are afraid, and quietly dignifies it. Adults are allowed to need their "solid, long loved thing" too. The poem does not promise that the night will brighten, only that a good memory can help us face it.