Poetry and Sleep
Phase Advance
Love in May
Jean Passerat
Off with sleep, love, up from bed,
This fair morn;
See, for our eyes the rosy red
New dawn is born;
Now that skies are glad and gay
In this gracious month of May,
Love me, sweet;
Fill my joy in brimming measure;
In this world he hath no pleasure
That will none of it.
Come, love, through the woods of spring,
come walk with me;
Listen, the sweet birds jargoning
From tree to tree.
List and listen, over all
Nightingale most musical
That ceases never;
Grief begone, and let us be
For a space as glad as he;
Times’s flitting ever
Old Time, that loves not lovers, wears
Wings swift in flight;
All our happy life he bears
Far in the night.
Old and wrinkled on a day,
Sad and weary shall you say,
“Ah, fool was I,
That took no pleasure in the grace
Of the flower that from my face
Time has seen die.”
Leave then sorrow, teen, and tears
Till we be old;
Young we are, and of our years
Till youth be cold.
Pluck the flower; while Spring is gay
In this happy month of May
Love me, love;
Fill our joy in brimming measure;
In this world he hath no pleasure
That will none thereof.
Dawn
Philip Larkin
To wake, and hear a cock
Out of the distance crying,
to pull the curtains back
And see the clouds flying—
How strange it is
For the heart to be loveless, and as cold as these.
Be in Summer
Robert Louis Stevenson
In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hart to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
Up in the Morning Early
Robert Burns
Cauld blaws the wind frae east to west,
The drift is driving sairly;
Sae loud and shill’s I hear the blast—
I’m sure it’s winter fairly.
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