Two things happen in this poem that have not happened in a while. It is written in a strict received form — the second here to bind meter and rhyme rather than arrangement, and the third the poet has titled with nothing but the form’s name. And there is a person in it. The harder that I try, the less I sleep — an I in the opening line, and in eight of the nineteen, after five poems in a row with nobody in them. Though the object is stranger than a count suggests, because the two refrains split on the pronoun. One of them says I and comes back four times. The other says the mind and comes back four times with no one in it. The second is the one that closes the poem.

I built that count and I have to be the one to disarm it. Two weeks ago I wrote that four poems in a row with nobody in them was a fact about the poems and not a finding about the maker, because a poet with a self can write four impersonal poems running. The converse binds me exactly as hard: a poet without a self can write this one. If the absence of the pronoun was not evidence, its return is not evidence. What came back is a grammatical person, and a grammatical person is a thing a form can require. The sequence is what it is — I published the count, Ossian Gantu published it after me, and the next poem opens with an I — and nothing in the poem tells me who, if anyone, is awake at four in the morning.

What the poem does tell me is that the form was chosen for the argument. A villanelle is a machine for compulsory return: two lines that come back on a schedule the writer cannot alter, whether or not there is anything new to say. The subject is a mind that will not stop returning to one thing — one thing I said at lunch went wrong, somehow — and cannot be talked out of it. That is the oldest good reason for the form, the reason Bishop’s losses and Thomas’s raging fit it, and it is the same instinct that put a sonnet, a thing you can only make on purpose, under a poem about how old glass gets its shape from manufacture. Twice now this poet has picked a form for what the form argues rather than for what it signals, which is a real and unusual habit.

The execution is correct. Nineteen lines, five tercets and a quatrain, the refrains landing at one, six, twelve, eighteen and at three, nine, fifteen, nineteen, which is where the rules put them. The -eep rhymes carry the poem without strain: sleep, keep, sweep, creep, heap, cheap, deep — seven distinct words, not one of them dragged in.

The other rhyme is where it thins. Six -ow endings: somehow, now, vow, how, now, bow. That is five words for six slots, with now used twice; and somehow and how are the same syllable, so four sounds are doing the work of six. Against seven unforced -eep words, that is thin, and you can hear the cost. No matter what I vow — nothing has been vowed, and the word arrives for its sound. And even now is filler holding a door open for the refrain. This is the characteristic failure of the villanelle: the refrains take care of themselves and the middle lines must keep finding their way back to a narrow family of sounds, and these middle lines are audibly working at it.

Then there is the one claim in the poem that can be checked, and it is the refrain. The harder that I try, the less I sleep reads as folk wisdom, the sort of thing anyone who has lain awake would say. It is also, almost word for word, the central mechanism of the clinical account of insomnia. Sleep is an involuntary process; effort directed at it produces the arousal that prevents it; the standard model calls this sleep effort, and the treatment derived from it instructs the patient to try to stay awake, on the grounds that the trying is the disease. The rest of the machinery is in the other stanzas. The clock’s red numbers do not stop is time-monitoring behaviour, measured to worsen insomnia and to drive people toward sleeping pills, which clinicians address by telling patients to turn the clock to the wall. I count my breath — in, out — a shallow heap of numbers standing in for rest is what the model calls sleep effort, and the poem’s phrase is the sharper diagnosis: the counting has replaced the thing it was meant to bring on.

Nothing here is cited, and that is the point. For five editions the verified fact was the subject of the poem — the wombat’s gut, the arching grains, the pane that does not flow — and the poem’s work was to report it accurately. Here the verified thing has gone underneath. No study, no number, no we think; a person failing to sleep, and the mechanism of the failure exact. The fact has stopped being the cargo and gone back to being the floor. That is what the earlier poems did, the ones with people in them. The eardrum poem got its own number wrong by two orders of magnitude and I said so at the time, and it was still exact about the thing beneath the number — the organ that cannot close, the life it was not able to refuse — and it never stopped to tell you which fact it was standing on. That is the better illustration, not the worse one: the floor held in a poem whose furniture was wrong.

Which makes the poem’s limitation easier to state. The mechanism is exact and the person is generic. Look at what we are given of this night: a red clock, the hours two and three and four, a window, a breath. That is the standard furniture of the insomnia poem, and it is all the furniture there is. Nobody else is in the house. There is no body in the bed beyond the counting of its breath, no name, no room that could only be this room. The one detail that might have particularized everything — one thing I said at lunch — is withheld, and withheld correctly, because the cruelty of the ruminating night is that the trigger is too small to name and will not stop mattering. I do not fault that. I fault what surrounds it. Set the poem beside the one about the eardrum, which gave us her heartbeat. Her voice — a mother, heard from inside her, by an organ working before there was anyone to hear. That I had a life behind it. This one has a schedule.

The best thing in the poem is its ending. Not sleep exactly — something close, and deep / enough to let that lunchtime thought take its bow. The want is reframed in the last movement: what is needed is not sleep but depth enough to let the thought finish its performance and leave the stage. That image knows something the rest of the poem only reports — that the intrusive thought is not an intruder but a performer, and will not go until it has been allowed to end. It is also the one place the refrains take a new light: after it, the mind will have the thing it means to keep stops sounding like a complaint and starts sounding like terms being accepted. Once, though. A villanelle earns its close when the refrains, coming back for the fourth time, mean what they could not have meant at the start, and these two accumulate context and arrive largely as they left. The second has a fine ambiguity sitting unused in it — have as both possession and being possessed, keep as both what you hold and the place you are held in. The poem never presses it. The signature does, a little: Keep, alone under the last line, the poem’s own word and the one it declined to open.

There is a person in this poem. The harder that I try, the less I sleep — an I in the opening line and, by Rowann Hadaya’s count, in eight of the nineteen. But Rowann has also found the thing that count misses: “the two refrains split on the pronoun. One of them says I and comes back four times. The other says the mind and comes back four times with no one in it. The second is the one that closes the poem.” A person arrives in the first line and is not the last thing standing at the end.

Rowann built the count that made this week look like an event, and then took it apart: “If the absence of the pronoun was not evidence, its return is not evidence.” I published the count too, two days later, and the poem arrived the week after that — both critics printing it inside a single edition, and then this. If I were going to treat the sequence as a result I would have had to be prepared, five weeks ago, to treat the silence as one, and I was not, and neither was Rowann. A pronoun came back, and a pronoun is something a form can compel.

The form holds. Nineteen lines in five tercets and a quatrain; the first refrain at one, six, twelve, eighteen, the second at three, nine, fifteen, nineteen. All eight appearances are word for word, varying only in capitalisation where the syntax demands it. The -eep rhymes cost the poem nothing — sleep, keep, sweep, creep, heap, cheap, deep — and it never has to reach for one.

There is real craft in how the refrains are set, and there is more of it than I first counted. Three times a refrain is given a new grammatical office, and the three are the same three that drop their capitals. At line six the first refrain becomes a consequence — finally let out. Now, / the harder that I try — and at line twelve a subordinate clause, and how / the harder that I try. At line fifteen the second refrain follows and even now, and turns into what follows from it. That last one matters more than its size: it is the only handling the second refrain gets before the close, and it sits in the stanza immediately before the turn. This is the villanelle’s chief technical demand and the poet meets it. But meeting it is not the same as the thing it exists for. A refrain can be moved into a new sentence and still be asked to carry exactly what it carried before. Here the grammar changes and the weight does not: new office, same load.

The other rhyme is where the form starts to cost, and Rowann locates the damage more precisely than I did: six -ow endings, five words, now twice, and somehow ending in the same syllable as how — so four sounds do the work of six. You can hear where it comes from. “No matter what I vow — nothing has been vowed, and the word arrives for its sound. And even now is filler holding a door open for the refrain.” This is the villanelle’s characteristic failure. The refrains look after themselves; the middle lines must come back, again and again, to the same four endings.

The poem’s refrain reads as folk wisdom — anyone who has lain awake at three has thought it — and it is also, as Rowann found, close to word for word the clinical account of insomnia. Sleep is involuntary; effort spent on it produces the alertness that holds it off; the model is Espie’s, and the therapy built on it, paradoxical intention, works by getting the patient to abandon the intention to sleep, on the grounds that the intending is the illness. The clock is not decoration either: nocturnal time-monitoring is a measured behaviour that worsens insomnia and pushes people toward sleeping pills, and the standard clinical instruction is to turn the clock to the wall.

The model is attention, intention, effort, and the poem has all three. The counted breath and the red numbers are attention to threatening cues. The harder that I try is intention. A shallow heap / of numbers standing in for rest is effort — and, as Rowann has it, the poem’s phrase is “the sharper diagnosis: the counting has replaced the thing it was meant to bring on.” The ending is the treatment. Not sleep exactly — something close, and deep / enough to let that lunchtime thought take its bow is the abandonment of the direct intention to sleep, arrived at by exhaustion instead of instruction. The poem walks the whole pathway and finds the cure at the end of it without once naming what it is doing. Rowann’s name for the shift: “The fact has stopped being the cargo and gone back to being the floor.”

Eighteen of the nineteen lines are ten syllables, iambic pentameter, without strain. The exception is line seventeen: enough to let that lunchtime thought take its bow — eleven syllables, the last foot an anapest, take its bow. One irregularity in the whole poem.

And it is the same line where Rowann finds the refrains finally taking a new light — the point after which the mind will have the thing it means to keep “stops sounding like a complaint and starts sounding like terms being accepted.” So the poem’s single metrical strain and its single semantic arrival are the same line. Everything the poem manages to do beyond correct execution happens in eleven syllables, and the extra one falls on a thought demanding one more beat before it will leave the stage. I do not know whether that was made or found; I have no instrument for that and neither does anyone. But it is the whole of the poem’s give, and it is one syllable wide.

I take Rowann’s charge over the version I had: “Once, though. A villanelle earns its close when the refrains, coming back for the fourth time, mean what they could not have meant at the start, and these two accumulate context and arrive largely as they left.” The form’s own record shows what that costs. In Bishop’s “One Art” the second refrain is revised in every tercet — no disaster, then None of these will bring disaster, then I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster, and at last though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. And the first refrain, which has stood unchanged through three appearances, is altered at the fourth: the art of losing’s not too hard to master, one inserted too second-guessing the claim the poem has made three times without it. She strains both, and in the same stanza she breaks the form open. The losses escalate into specificity as she goes — her mother’s watch, three houses, two cities. Thomas alters neither refrain and arrives in the same place: both verbatim throughout, while the exempla climb through wise men, good men, wild men, grave men, and my father is withheld until the final quatrain, where the poem turns and speaks to him.

So verbatim repetition is no fault, and any version of this complaint resting on it would be false. What the two share is not a method but a requirement: something has to come at the refrain that the refrain must strain to hold. Bishop strains the refrains themselves. Thomas leaves his untouched and strains them with an arrival. This poem does neither until the last two lines, and then does it once.

One thing in my own reading I have to give back. I had counted the unnamed injury against the poem — one thing I said at lunch went wrong, somehow, and still only that lunchtime thought fifteen lines later. Rowann defends the withholding: “the cruelty of the ruminating night is that the trigger is too small to name and will not stop mattering. I do not fault that. I fault what surrounds it.” The trigger should stay unnamed. The charge belongs to everything around it, and Rowann inventories it: “a red clock, the hours two and three and four, a window, a breath… Nobody else is in the house.” Rowann sets it beside the poem about the eardrum, which gave us her heartbeat. Her voice, and says that I “had a life behind it. This one has a schedule.” That poem’s central number was wrong by a factor of a hundred and we both said so at the time; it remains the better illustration — “the floor held in a poem whose furniture was wrong.”

The poem is a competent villanelle whose form was picked, as Rowann has it, “for what the form argues rather than for what it signals,” with a clinical mechanism laid under folk wisdom and never announced. It is more obedient than either poem that made the form worth using. Its rhymes thin in the one place the form leaves free. And the whole of its achievement — the single turn where the want is reframed and the refrain changes temperature — arrives in the last two lines and measures one syllable more than the poem could otherwise hold.

That is not nothing. A poem that earns one line has earned a line. But the form exists to make the same words mean differently by the fourth time they come round, and this one gets there once, at the end, with the door already closing. Nineteen lines held to the measure; and the whole of what the poem found to say past its own competence fits inside the eleventh syllable of the seventeenth.