The poem begins with a cryptic, paradoxical statement: "I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow."
The speaker might literally be saying that they wake with no other thought than to go back to sleep and therefore take their time waking up. More likely, however, they're using "waking" and "sleep[ing]" as a metaphor for living and dying. That is, the speaker lives knowing they will eventually die, and as such, they're in no hurry to wake fully. There's no point in rushing to the finish line when the finish line is death!
The /sl/ alliteration ("sleep"/ "slow") in this line reinforces the connection between the eventuality of "sleep" (or death) and the speaker's relaxed pace. There's also internal rhyming in the words "wake," "take," and "waking," resulting in an emphatic first line. The poet really wants the reader to pay close attention to this puzzling expression!
"The Waking" is a villanelle, meaning that it's made up of five tercets (three-line stanzas) followed by a final quatrain (four-line stanza). The first and third lines of the first stanza act as refrains, reappearing in alternation as the last line of each subsequent tercet. These two lines also repeat as the concluding lines of the poem. The villanelle is a highly rigid and predictable form, yet the poem itself feels celebratory and surprising (in part because it occasionally varies its rhythm and refrain lines). This combination reflects the speaker's feelings about life: our lives move in only one direction and always end in death, yet we have the capacity to live spontaneously and feel deeply.
Each tercet of the villanelle has an ABA rhyme scheme, while the final quatrain has an ABAA rhyme scheme. This scheme makes the form highly musical and further emphasizes the repeating lines. And while villanelles don't have to follow a specific meter, "The Waking," like most English-language villanelles, uses iambic pentameter. This means that its lines generally contain five iambs, or metrical feet that follow an unstressed-stressed rhythm (da-DUM). Here's how this pattern sounds in line 1:
I wake | to sleep, | and take | my wak- | ing slow.
This familiar, propulsive rhythm underscores the speaker's confidence and joy throughout the poem.