Poetry and Sleep
Parasomnia
The Sleeping Passenger
David Paul
The train relinquishes the station,
The doors slap shut, the posters slide,
And the windows move, in green gradation,
On to opening fans of countryside
Whose revolutions intrude no shape
Into your sleep’s untroubled void.
Your father begot you in his sleep
- And your mother was probably sleeping too.
You have never wakened up,
Even when your eyes open blue
Windows of astonishment
Into a world they do not know,
They see it as an awkward instant
- A something not to be inquired into.
Though all should founder—or at least shake,
You ripen like fruit on a sunny wall,
Too cosy asleep ever to wake:
Waiting to be picked, or to fall.
Your untroubled blood dictates
Growth asleep, like a vegetable.
You are unacquainted with the fates,
For you there is no precipice
Between this state and other states.
What was, what will be, and what is
Indistinguishable harden
Into the rails whose rhythm marries
Your dream to its mechanical burden.
You do not talk of the atom bomb,
The weather, or what grows in your garden.
Unbothered by daily news or doom
You have taken conscience and let it slip
Back to the limbo where it came from.
Others may be puzzled, you can cope,
You are master of your situation
Because you have never sized it up.
You have already reached your destination.
She tells her Love while Half Asleep
Robert Graves
She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.
One Night as I did Wander
Robert Burns
Time—“John Anderson, my jo.”
One night as I did wanter,
When corn begins to shoot,
I sat me down to ponder,
Upon a auld tree root;
Auld Ayr ran by before me,
And bricker’d to the seas;
A cushat crooded o’er me,
That echoed through the trees.
Out of Sleep
Bernard Spencer
Surfacing out of sleep she feared
voices in the sky talking
with thick tongues. Night flashed
brightening her eyelids; Yet as panic cleared
she knew those voices never spoke the harsh
brogue of the guns; And then the rain
sighed in the leaves; it was thunder.
The rain said, hush.
It has been peace in our world a year:
What worse-than-memories seep
to infect our nights with fear
up from the angers of that other war,
ours copy here?
What towns burn on what darker coast of sleep,
how many histories deep?
On a Bird Singing in its Sleep
Robert Frost
A bird half wakened in the lunar noon
Sang half way through its little inborn tune.
Partly because it sang but once all night
And that from no especial bush’s height;
Partly because it sang ventriloquist
And had the inspiration to desist
Almost before the prick of hostile ears,
It ventured less in peril than appears.
It could not have come down to us so far
Through the interstices of things ajar
On the long bead chain of repeated birth
To be a bird while we are men on earth
If singing out of sleep and dream that way
Had made it much more easily a prey.
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