Poetry and Sleep
Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
A Night in June
William Wordsworth
The sun has long been set,
The stars are out by twos and threes,
The little birds are piping yet
among the bushes and the trees;
There’s a cuckoo, and one or two thrushes,
And a far-off wind that rushes,
and a sound of water that gushes,
And the cuckoo’s sovereign cry
Fills all the hollow of the sky.
Who would go ‘parading’
In London, ‘and masquerading’,
On such a night of June
With that beautiful soft half-moon,
And all these innocent blisses?
On such a night as this is!
‘In drear-nighted December’
John Keats
I
In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne’er remember
Their green felicity:
The north cannot undo them,
With a sleety whistle through them,
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime.
II
In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne’er remember
Apollo’s summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never petting
About the frozen time.
III
Ah! would ‘twere so with many
A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any
Writhed not of passed joy?
The feel of not to feel it,
When there is none to heal it,
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme.
Fall, Leaves, Fall
Emily Bronte
Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
fluttering from the autumn tree.
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night’s decay
Ushers in a drearier day.
Frog Autumn
Sylvia Plath
Summer grows old, cold-blooded mother.
The insects are scant, skinny.
In these palustral homes we only
Croak and wither.
Mornings dissipate in somnolence.
The sun brightens tardily
Among the pithless reeds. Flies fail us.
The fen sickens.
Frost drops even the spider. Clearly
The genius of plenitude
Houses himself elsewhere. Our folk thin
Lamentably.
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