Somewhere in a back yard, an amateur astronomer named McConkey is setting up his telescope, and the poem watches him do it. Its subject is simple enough: the quiet ritual of stargazing. What makes it interesting is the argument tucked inside that ritual. Dickey sets the glare of human commerce against the slow, indifferent light of the stars, and then suggests that a patient person with the right instrument can make the second one answer him.
The structure is built on repetition. Each of the four stanza pairs begins with "After" and ends with "In the back yard," so the poem keeps clearing away one layer of artificial light before allowing the natural light to arrive. First the sun goes, then the searchlights and the neon sign, then the lights of houses, and finally even the lighthouse. The order is a gradual dimming of the human world, and each step brings the stargazer closer to real darkness, which is the condition he needs. The refrain "In the back yard" also gives the poem a deliberately humble setting. The cosmos is addressed from a patch of ordinary ground, and that modesty is part of the charm.
The opening images are sharp and a little rude. The sun is "round red corporate" and sinks "with a glittering smile and smoking a big cigar," a sunset imagined as a businessman leaving the office, pleased with himself. The chimneys are "upright bits of punk," punk meaning smouldering tinder, and they "stink." Even the brick loses its "assurance of what they are," a lovely phrase suggesting that daylight gives industrial things a false confidence which dusk strips away. Later, searchlights "die to red worms," and the neon "Eat!" on a "nondescript short order shack" flickers and fades. Dickey's humor here has a purpose: by making the human world look loud, greasy and slightly ridiculous, he prepares us to value what comes after it.
The stars are handled in an entirely different register. The light is "long," and "the longer light is steady," a small piece of precision that distinguishes between the shaking of the atmosphere and the steadiness of the light itself, which has "come down the channels of the dark." The third stanza pair is the most abstract and the most beautiful. The starlight "follows / Dark stars upon their courses" and arrives "singled from the profusion of its fellows / Like an intention marrying to your will." Of all the countless rays, one finds its way to one eye, and the poem calls this a kind of marriage between the universe's intention and the watcher's will.
Formally, the poem is steady and traditional. The stanzas are quatrains with alternating rhymes (sunk/punk, cigar/are), and the lines run in a loose iambic pentameter, long and unhurried like the watching itself. Some rhymes are exact, while others, such as "finished" and "diminished," have a pleasing slight slant, and the effect is a voice that is controlled without sounding stiff. The address to "McConkey" by name gives the poem a friendly, almost conversational warmth, as if the speaker were calling to a neighbor over the fence.
The ending turns on the idea of reply. The stars are "voices that never yet made reply," and a stanza earlier, the lights of houses dim "for the long whisper into night," so human beings are going quiet while the sky is waiting to be heard. The final lines promise that the stars "Will fall like willing answers to your eye." It is a confident, even cheeky claim. The skilled observer, knowing "the secret way to catch them," turns the silent universe into a conversation partner.
That is why the poem lingers. It treats scientific attention as something close to intimacy, and it does so without sentimentality, surrounded as it is by smoke, neon and a short-order shack. The glittering sun may be a smug executive, but the poem's real hero is the person who waits in the dark, eye to the lens, and is answered.