Poetry and Sleep
Gift of Sleep
The Sleep
Elizabeth Barret Browning
“He giveth His beloved sleep.”
-Psalm 127:2
I
Of all the thoughts of God that are
Borne inward into souls afar,
Along the Psalmist’s music deep,
Now tell me if that any is,
For gift or grace, surpassing this:
“He giveth His beloved, sleep?”
II
What would we give to our beloved?
The hero’s heart to be unmoved,
The poet’s star-tun’d harp to sweep,
The patriot’s voice to teach and rouse,
The monarch’s crown to light the brows?—
He giveth His beloved, sleep.
III
What do we give to our beloved?
A little faith all undisproved,
A little dust to overweep,
And bitter memories to make
The whole earth blasted for our sake:
He giveth His beloved, sleep.
IV
“Sleep soft,” beloved! we sometimes say,
Who have no tune to charm away
Sad dreams that through the eyelids creep:
But never doleful dream again
Shall break the happy slumber when
He giveth His beloved, sleep.
V
O earth, so full of dreary noises!
O men, with wailing in your voices!
O delved gold, the wailers heap!
O strife, O curse, that o’er it fall!
God strikes a silence through you all,
And giveth His beloved, sleep.
VI
His dews drop mutely on the hill,
His cloud above it saileth still,
Though on its slope men sow and reap:
More softly than the dew is shed,
Or cloud is floated overhead,
He giveth His beloved, sleep.
VII
Ay, men may wonder while they scan
A living, thinking, feeling man
Confirm’d in such a rest to keep;
But angels say, and through the word
I think their happy smile is heard—
“He giveth His beloved, sleep.”
VIII
For me, my heart that erst did go
Most like a tired child at a show,
That sees through tears the mummers leap,
Would now its wearied vision close,
Would childlike on His love repose
Who giveth His beloved, sleep.
XI
And friends, dear friends, when it shall be
That this low breath is gone from me,
And round my bier ye come to weep,
Let One, most loving of you all,
Say, “Not a tear must o’er her fall!
He giveth His beloved, sleep.”
Sleeping Compartment
Norman MacCaig
I don’t like this, being carried sideways
through the night. I feel wrong and helpless—like
a timber broadside in a fast stream.
Such a way of moving my suit
that odd snake the sidewinder
in Arizona: but not me in Perthshire.
I feel at right angles to everything,
a crossgrain in existence.—It scrapes
the top of my head an my footsoles.
To forget outside is no help either—
then I become a blockage
in the long gut of the train.
I try to think I’m an Alice in Wonderland
mountaineer bivouacked
on a ledge five feet high.
It’s no good. I go sidelong.
I rock sideways…I draw in my feet
To let Aviemore pass.
He’ll cut string with a match flame
and start a car with a paper-clip.
A bed’s head is a gate. He’ll carry water
in his hat.
His holy life has no religion.
He makes do with objects and people.
He’s bedraggled as a saint,
with a go-to-heaven hat
and go-to-hell boots.
He’s happy as an otter
lying on its back in Kirkaig Bay,
eating a fish
and using its chest for a table.
“At the Chiming of Light upon Sleep”
Philip Larkin
At the chiming of light upon sleep
A picture relapsed into the deep
Tarn, the hardly-stirring spring
Where memory changes to prefiguring.
Was it myself walking across that grass?
Was it myself, in a rank Michaelmas,
Closed among laurels? It was a green world,
Unchanging holly with the curled
Points, cypress and conifers,
All that through the winter bears
Coarsened fertility against the frost.
Nothing in such a sanctuary could be lost.
And yet, there were no flowers.
Morning, and more
Than morning, crossed the floor.
Had I been wrong, to think that breath
That sharpens life is life itself, not death?
Never to see, if death were killed,
No desperation, perpetually unfulfilled,
Would ever go fracturing down in ecstasy?
Death quarrels, and shakes the tree,
And fears are flowers, and flowers are generation,
And the founding, foundering, beast-instructed mansion
Of love called into being by this same death
Hangs everywhere its light. Unsheath
The life you carry and die, cries the cock
On the crest of the sun: unlock
The words and seeds that drove
Adam out of his undeciduous grove.
Before Sleep
Prudentius
The toil of day is ebbing,
The quiet comes again,
In slumber deep relaxing
The limbs of tired men.
And minds with anguish shaken,
And spirits racked with grief,
The cup of all forgetting
Have drunk and found relief.
The still Lethean waters
Now steal through every vein,
And men no more remember
The meaning of their pain…
Let, let the weary body
Lie sunk in slumber deep.
The heart shall still remember
Christ in its very sleep.
Good Night
William Carlos Williams
In brilliant gas light
I turn the kitchen spigot
and watch the water plash
into the clean white sink.
On the grooved drain-board
to one side is
a glass filled with parsley—
crisped green.
Waiting
for the water to freshen—
I glance at the spotless floor—:
a pair of rubber sandals
lie side by side
under the wall-table
all is in order for the night.
Waiting, with a glass in my hand
—three girls in crimson satin
pass close before me on
the murmurous background of
the crowded opera—
memory playing the clown—
three vague, meaningless girls
full of smells and
the rustling sound of
cloth rubbing on cloth and
little slippers on carpet—
high-school French
spoken in a loud voice!
Parsley in a glass,
still and shining,
brings me back. I take my drink
and yawn deliciously.
I am ready for bed.
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