[Moffett begins by quoting the second sonnet and describing it as written in a "clear, sane, civilized voice" that works by pulling the reader’s direction in two ways]

It registers the regret of a son whose father’s "soul" was obscured by two consuming interests that could not be shared until "too late"; at the same time it is distracted and entertained by the devices of Merrill’s style: the astronomical metaphor {eclipse, chilled wives in orbit), the double entendres (cloud banks, sable, rings), and the cliché "time is money" being stood on its head. …

The proportions of amusement and emotion are reversed in the fourth sonnet. … Because of her context we know the woman must be the child’s mother, otherwise she might be taken solely for the terrifying female principle celebrated in a host of poems and myths, La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Certainly this sonnet, which brilliantly reveals the contrasts between passive appearances and dreadful realities, reveals as well this female principle in the clutching maternal figure on the bed, against whom a child’s sole defense is flight. Mother, of course, represents Woman to all children; the point here is that Woman – even supine and probably asleep – terrifies this child who needs to find and touch her. The scene resolves as a paradigm for all the heterosexual material in Merrill’s work: desire to open closed doors, to approach and touch the Sleeping Woman, is countermanded by fear of waking her innate deadliness and being made her captive.