Poetry and Sleep
Insomnia
Not to sleep
Robert Graves (1895-1985)
Not to sleep all the night long, for pure joy,
Counting no sheep and careless of chimes
Welcoming the dawn confabulation
Of birch, her children, who discuss idly
Fanciful details of the promised coming -
Will she be wearing red, or russet, or blue,
Or pure white? - whatever she wears, glorious:
Not to sleep all the night long, for pure joy,
This is given to few but at last to me,
So that when 1 laugh and stretch and leap from bed
I shall glide downstairs, my feet brushing the carpet
In courtesy to civilized progression,
Though, did 1 wish, I could soar through the open window
And perch on a branch above, acceptable ally
Of the birds still alert, grumbling gently together.
A Sleepless Night
Philip Levine (1928-), US Poet Laureate
April, and the last of the plum blossoms
scatters on the black grass
before dawn. The sycamore, the lime,
the struck pine inhale
the first pale hints of sky.
An iron day,
I think, yet it will come
dazzling, the light
rise from the belly of leaves and pour
burning from the cups
of poppies.
The mockingbird squawks
from his perch, fidgets,
and settles back. The snail, awake
for good, trembles from his shell
and sets sail for China. My hand dances
in the memory of a million vanished stars.
A man has every place to lay his head.
Counting Sheep
Russell Edson (1935-)
A scientist has a test tube full of sheep. He
wonders if he should try to shrink a pasture
for them.
They are like grains of rice.
He wonders if it is possible to shrink something
out of existence.
He wonders if the sheep are aware of their tininess,
if they have any sense of scale. Perhaps they think
the test tube is a glass barn ...
He wonders what he should do with them; they
certainly have less meat and wool than ordinary
sheep. Has he reduced their commercial value?
He wonders if they could be used as a substitute
for rice, a sort of wooly rice . . .
He wonders if he shouldn't rub them into a red paste
between his fingers.
He wonders if they are breeding, or if any of them
have died.
He puts them under a microscope, and falls asleep
counting them . . .
Sleep
Russell Edson (1935-)
There was a man who didn't know how to sleep; nodding
off every night into a drab, unprofessional sleep. Sleep that
he'd grown so tired of sleeping.
He tried reading The Manual of Sleep, but it just put him
to sleep. That same old sleep that he had grown so tired of
sleeping . . .
He needed a sleeping master, who with a whip and a
chair would discipline the night, and make him jump through
hoops of gasolined fire. Someone who could make a tiger sit
on a tiny pedestal and yawn . . .
THE CONGRESS OF THE INSOMNIACS
Charles Simic: Hotel Insomnia, 1992
Mother of God, everyone is invited:
Stargazing Peruvian shepherds,
Old men on sidewalks of New York.
You, too, doll with eyes open
Listening to the rain next to a sleeping child.
A big hotel ballroom with mirrors on every side.
Think about it as you lie in the dark.
Angels on its ornate ceilings,
Naked nymphs in what must be paradise.
There‘s a stage, a lectern,
An usher with a flashlight.
Someone will address this gathering yet
From his bed of nails.
Sleeplessness is like metaphysics.
Be there.
HOTEL INSOMNIA
Charles Simic: Hotel Insomnia, 1992
I liked my little hole,
Its window facing a brick wall.
Next door there was a piano.
A few evenings a month
A crippled old man came to play
„My Blue Heaven.“
Mostly, though, it was quiet.
Each room with its spider in heavy overcoat
Catching his fly with a web
Of cigarette smoke and revery.
So dark,
I could not see my face in the shaving mirror.
At 5 A.M. the sound of bare feet upstairs.
The „Gypsy“ fortuneteller,
Whose storefront is on the corner,
Going to pee after a night of love.
Once, too, the sound of a child sobbing.
So near it was, I thought
For a moment, I was sobbing myself.
CAGED FORTUNETELLER
Charles Simic: Hotel Insomnia, 1992
Sleeplessness, you‘re like a pawnshop
Open late
On a street of failing businesses
The owner plays a flute,
And it‘s like night birds calling
In a city where there are no birds.
There‘s a painting over the cash register:
Of a stiff Quaker couple dressed in black.
They each hold a cat under their arm.
One is a tiger, the other is Siamese.
The eyes are closed because it‘s very late,
And because cats see better with eyes closed.
The pawnshop owner has an electric fortuneteller
In a glass cage.
Now he plugs her in and turns the other lights off.
„O foolish fellow“, says she,
„If you can find your way, please hurry to me,
I‘ll even take out my breasts at the door
To light your way in the dark.“
The street is shadowy and so is the sky.
We could be meeting Jacob and the angel.
We could be meeting our sleeplessness,
And the nun who carries morphine to the dying,
The black nun in soft, furry slippers.
Sonnet 27
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head,
To work my mind, when body's work's expired:
For then my thoughts, from far where I abide,
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,
Looking on darkness which the blind do see
Save that my soul's imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night,
Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.
Lo! thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind,
For thee and for myself no quiet find.
Insomniac
Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
There are some nights when
sleep plays coy,
aloof and disdainful.
And all the wiles
that I employ to win
its service to my side
are useless as wounded pride,
and much more painful.
Sleep
Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941)
In the night of weariness
let me give myself up to sleep without struggle,
resting my trust upon thee.
Let me not force my flagging spirit into a poor preparation for thy worship.
It is thou who drawest the veil of night upon the tired eyes of the day
to renew its sight in a fresher gladness of awakening.
Talking in Bed
Philip Larkin
Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
Bed Time
Peter Davison
Few beds are stonier than one shared by a sleeper
and a waker who stares into the dark
listening to the house breathe. Children
sigh, dogs snore, clocks tick, radiators mutter.
Love past, he lies vacant. Bed carries him
to countries that his body will never visit,
regions where his mind cannot drink the water.
Feet up. Blood trickles through his head
to pass between Horn Gate and Ivory Gate.
Sleep pilot, dreamer, flying Dutchman,
he steers his ticktock course between chills and fever,
bound out of Birthport for Lovepool and Death Haven.
Love past! Clandestine beds in borrowed apartments.
Fern beds, pine needles, beds for porcheria,
beds whose springs crumpled from exuberance
or rattled with anger, beds whose backs bent
from nightly throes of union and reunion.
“O bed, where first I loosed my virgin girdle…”
She fell upon her knees and kissed the bed.
As in a hospital where he awaits in bed
the next day’s condescension of doctors,
he bleeds broken promises. Is it sailing time
for the ship of fools, the ship of the dead?
Pain lightning flickers and spatters
the four-cornered flatland of his life,
but what else is there to fall back on?
In bed we depend upon nothing but bed.
Insomnia
Billy Collins
Even though the house is deeply silent
and the room, with no moon,
is perfectly dark,
even though the body is a sack of exhaustion
inert on the bed,
someone inside me will not
get off his tricycle,
will not stop tracing the same tight circle
on the same green threadbare carpet.
It makes no difference whether I lie
staring at the ceiling
or pace the living-room floor,
he keeps on making his furious rounds,
little pedaler in his frenzy,
my own worst enemy, my oldest friend.
What is there to do but close my eyes
and watch him circling the night,
schoolboy in an ill-fitting jacket,
leaning forward, his cap on backwards,
wringing the handlebars,
maintaining a certain speed?
Does anything exist at this hour
in this nest of dark rooms
but the spectacle of him
and the hope that before dawn
I can lift out some curious detail
that will carry me off to sleep—
the watch that encircles his pale wrist,
the expandable band,
the tiny hands that keep pointing this way and that.
CCLXVI. To Sleep
William Wordsworth
A Flock of sheep that leisurely pass by
One after one; the sound of rain, and bees
Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas,
Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky—
I’ve thought of all by turns, and still I lie
Sleepless; and soon the small birds’ melodies
Must hear, first utter’d from my orchard trees,
And the first cuckoo’s melancholy cry.
Even thus last night, and two nights more I lay,
And could not win thee, Sleep, by any stealth:
So do not let me wear to-night away.
Without thee what is all the morning’s wealth?
Come, blessed barrier between day and day,
Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health!
Insomnia
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Thin are the night-skirts left behind
By daybreak hours that onward creep,
And thin, alas! the shred of sleep
That wavers with the spirit’s wind:
But in half-dreams that shift and roll
And still remember and forget,
My soul this hour has drawn your soul
A little nearer yet.
Our lives, most dear, are never near,
Our thougts are never far apart,
Though all that draws us heart to heart
Seems fainter now and now more clear.
To-night Love claims his full control,
And with desire and with regret
My soul this hour has drawn your soul
A little nearer yet.
Is there a home where heavy earth
Melts to bright air that breathes no pain,
Where water leaves no thirst again
And springing fire is Love’s new birth?
If faith long bound to one true goal
May there at length its hope beget,
My soul that hour shall draw your soul
For ever nearer yet.
To His Watch, When He Could Not Sleep
Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury
Uncessant Minutes, whil’st you move you tell
The time that tells our life, which though it run
Never so fast or farr, your new begun
Short steps shall overtake; for though life well
May scape his own Account, it shall not yours,
You are Death’s Auditors, that both divide
And sum what ere that life inspir’d endures
Past a beginning, and through you we bide
The doom of Fate, whose unrecall’d Decred
You date, bring, execute; making what’s new,
Ill and good, old, for as we die in you,
You die in Time, Time in Eternity.
Insomnia
Tristan Corbière
Insomnia, impalpable Animal!
Is your love only cerebral?
That you come and are delighted to spy,
Under your evil eye, the man chewing
His sheets, writhing and stewing
With ennui!...Under your black diamond eye.
Tell me: why, in a night without repose,
Rainy like a Sunday, in your lope
To lick us like a dog: Hope
Or Regret keeping watch, close
At our ear throbbing
You speak low…and say nothing?
Why do you always pass
To our parched throats your empty glass
And leave us with our necks contorted,
Tantaluses, drunkards on chimera:
—Bitter dregs or loving philter,
Cool dew or molten lead!—
Insomnia, aren’t you a pretty miss?...
Well why, lewd maid,
Do you get us between your hips?
Why fade out on our lips,
Why leave our bed unmade
And…don’t get laid?
Why, Pretty-by-night, blooming unclean,
Tis black mask on your face?...
—To complicate golden dreams?...
Aren’t you love in space,
The breath of Messalina, exhausted,
But not yet sated!
Insomnia, are you Hysteria…
Are you the barrel organ grinding
The Elect’s Hosannah?...
—Or aren’t you the plectrum everlasting
On the nerves of the damned-of-letters, who tone
Up verses—read by them alone.
Insomnia, are you Buridan’s
Ass in turmoil—or the moth
Of hell?—Your fiery kiss fans
A cold taste of iron red-hot…
Oh! come to my hovel and settle!...
We’ll sleep together a little.
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