Although very short, the poem has many literary techniques beginning with the metaphors of the "sheath of sleep" and the "dream womb" that identify the enveloping state of sleeping from which the narrator is so rudely shaken. Later in the poem, the moonlit night is described as "the night of milk-moonlit thin cloud glow," which helps the reader envisage the pale white cast of light over the dark landscape. The concept of sleep is also described as "the shadow pool" where the children and lover exist. The people are not in an actual pool, but they lie in the floating space of sleep and dream.

Similes are prevalent in the poem, too, for example, when the raccoon noise awakens the man whose "mind rises up to a fact like a fish to a hook." Obviously a mind cannot be caught on a hook but the...