Villanelle assignment

I read "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke. This poem is about how someone's life is aging, realizing how close he is to death, and he is also learning things about life as he starts to age. In this poem, there were a lot of symbolism that I think was the main idea of the story. For example, sleep is symboling death in my opinion. The rhyme scheme of the villanelle was ABA throught out the poem and ABAB for the last stanza. I think that the main ideas of a villanelle are really empahsized because they get repeated numerous times in the poem.