Poetry and Sleep
Sleep is for Restoration
“Life is Simple” (short version)
Leif Brauteseth
I only "do" two things in life;
I am either asleep or awake!
Sleep is my default mode; Wakefulness is a transient,
inconvenient but necessary interruption of my sleep.
The more I "do" when I am awake,
the better my quality of sleep.
I "do" one sleep hour for every two hours I spend
"doing" awake.
For every hour I "do" awake, somebody must pay!
When I am awake, I only "do" two things;
Things I want to do and things other people want me to
do.
If I do what I want to do, I pay,
If I do what "they" want, they pay!
If "they" can't pay, and I don't want to do anything for
"my account",
I go back to SLEEP.
“Coming at Last to Night’s most Thankful Springs”
Philip Larkin
Coming at last to night’s most thankful springs,
I meet a runner’s image, sharply kept
Ambered in memory from mythology;
A man who never turned aside and slept,
Nor put on masks of love; to whom all things
Were shadowlike against the news he bore,
Pale as the sky: one who for certainty
Had not my hesitations, lest he see
The loud and precious scroll of sounding shields.
Not worth the carrying, when held before
The full moon travelling through her shepherdless fields.
Randall Jarrell
Robert Lowell
The dream went like a rake of sliced bamboo,
slats of dust distracted by a downdraw;
I woke and knew I held a cigarette;
I looked, there was none, could have been none;
I slept off years before I woke again,
palming the floor, shaking the sheets. I saw
nothing was burning. I awoke, I saw
I was holding two lighted cigarettes…
They come this path, old friends, old buffs of death.
Tonight it’s Randall, his spark still fire though humble,
his gnawed wrist cradled like Kitten. “What kept you so long,
racing the cooling grindstone of your ambition?
You didn’t write, you rewrote…But tell me,
Cal, why did we live? Why do we die?
A Lang Sleep Owre
Donald Campbell
A lang sleep owre, I wakened
with a blash of sunlicht on my face
and the birds singing high in the clean
blue lift. Outby, the women and bairns
laughed and clattered in the dirl
and clack of the day, tongues gurling
into my brain like the rattle
of some braw siller.
It was a morning to mind, with the water
so pure and the fish running wild
ablow the skeltering waves, lassies
bold and randy in the long grass.
My fingers raxed and grabbed:
my hairt filled up.
I was fresh and ready to go.
But not to be. Syne, the men came
back frae the hill with tired een and blattered
faces. Bluid on their hands (and some no there).
My faither shook his heid and spat
into the green grass. The sun
turned away and sea
was befiled with a new clairt.
A hard rain began to fall…
…and the lang sleep was owre.
Lullaby for a Naughty Girl
E.V. Rieu
Oh peace, my Penelope: slaps are the fate
Of all little girls who are born to be great;
And the greatest of Queens have all been little girls
And dried up their tears on their kerchiefs or curls.
Oh sleep; and your heart that has sobbed for so long
Will mend and grow merry and wake you to song;
For the world is a lovelier place than it seems,
And a smack cannot follow you into your dreams.
The dark Cleopatra was slapped on the head,
And she wept as she lay in her great golden bed;
But the dark Cleopatra woke up with a smile
As she thought of the little boats out on the Nile.
And Helen of Troy had many a smack:
She moaned and she murmured the Greek for “Alack!”
But the sun rose in Argos, and wonderful joy
Came with the morning to Helen of Troy.
They sent Guinevere without supper to sleep
In her grey little room at the top of the Keep;
And the stars over Camelot waited and wept
Till the peeping moon told them that Guinevere slept.
There was grief in Castile and dismay in Madrid
When they slapped Isabella for something she did;
But she slept—and could laugh in the morning again
At the Dons of Castile, the Hidalgos of Spain.
And oh, how Elizabeth cried in her cot
When she wanted her doll and her Nanny said not!
But the sparrows awoke and the morning sun rose,
And there was the doll on the bed by her toes.
So sleep, my Penelope: slaps are the fate
Of all little girls who are born to be great;
But the world is a lovelier place than it seems,
And a smack cannot follow you into your dreams.
Day and Night
Lady Linsay
Said Day to Night,
“I bring God’s light.
What gift have you?”
Night said, “The dew.”
“I give bright hours,”
Quoth Day, “and flowers.”
Said Night, “More blest,
I bring sweet rest.”
To the Moon
Andrew Lang
Hide this one night thy crescent, kindly Moon;
so hall Endymion faithful prove, and rest
Loving and unawakened on thy breast;
so shall not foul enchanter importune
Thy quiet course; for now the night is boon,
And through the friendly night unseen I fare,
Who dread the face of foemen unaware,
And watch of hostile spies in the bright noon.
Thou knowest, Moon, the bitter power of Live;
‘Tis told how shepherd Pan found ways to move,
For little price, thy heart; and of your grace,
Sweet stars, be kind to this not alien fire,
Because on earth ye did not scorn desire,
Bethink ye, now ye hold your heavenly place.
Sleeping they bear me
Alfred Mombert
Sleeping they bear me
Into my homeland.
From far away I come,
Hither over peaks and chasms
Over a dark ocean
Into my homeland.
Now that I have quelled the strongest
of the giants,
Out of the darkest land
Won my way home,
Led by a white fairy hand—
Echo heavy the bells.
And I stagger through the streets
Sleep-bound.
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