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Poetry and Sleep
Negative Aspects of Sleep
Beside the Bed
Charlotte Mew
Someone has shut the shining eyes, straightened and folded
the wandering hands quietly covering the unquiet breast:
So, smoothed and silenced you lie, like child not again to be questioned or scolded;
but, for you, not one of us believes that this is rest.
Not so to close the windows down can cloud and deaden
the blue beyond: or to screen the wavering flame subdue its breath:
Why, if I lay my cheek to your cheek, your grey lips, like dawn, would quiver and redden,
Breaking into the old, odd smile at this fraud of death.
Because all night you have not turned to us or spoken
It is time for you to wake; your dreams were never very deep:
I, for one, have seen the thin, bright, twisted threads of them dimmed suddenly and broken,
This is only a most piteous pretence of sleep!
“Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream”
John Keats
I
Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream,
And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?
The transient pleasures as a vision seem,
And yet we think the greatest pain’s to die.
II
How strange it is that man on earth should roam,
And lead a life of woe, but not forsake
His rugged path; nor dare he view alone
His future doom which is but to awake.
Care-Charmer Sleep
Samuel Daniel
Care-Charmer Sleep, sonne of the sable night,
Brother to death, in silent darkness borne:
Relieue my languish, and restore the light,
With darke forgetting of my cares returne.
And let the day be time enough to mourne
The shipwrach of my ill aduentied youth:
Let waking eues suffise to waile their scorne,
Without the torment of the nights untruth.
Cease dreames, th’Images of day desires,
To modell forth the passions of the morrow:
Neuer let rising Sunne approue you liers,
To adde more griefe to aggrauate my sorrow.
Still let me sleep, imbracing clouds in vaine,
And neuer wake to feele the daies disdaine.
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