|  As
I menioned recently, I get suggestions on topics for this piece
from all sorts of sources, at all sorts of times. So a few days
ago, I said “What shall I do my poetry piece on this week?” and
received the thoughtful answer “Oh, go to sleep!” So that’s what
it is going to be.
Sleep.
The image is common
with poets, and indeed many of the poems we have quoted in the
past here have used it. Here is Keats (1795 – 1821) in Endymion:
A thing of beauty
is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
And again, in The
Eve of St. Agnes Porphyro sees Madeline asleep:
Then by the bed-side,
where the faded moon
Made a dim, silver twilight, soft he set
A table, and, half anguish’d, threw thereon
A cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet: -
O for some drowsy Morphean amulet!
The boisterous, midnight, festive clarion,
The kettle-drum, and far-heard clarinet,
Affray his ears, though but in dying tone: -
The hall door shuts again, and all the noise is gone.
And still she slept
an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.
St. Agnes is the patroness
of virgins and girl scouts. That’s an interesting conjunction,
if you think about it. She was martyred in 304 A.D., when she
was thirteen years old, principally for rejecting Eutropus, the
pagan governor’s son. Her day is January 21st, so we’re fairly
close.
Many of the poems
we have used in the past contain the ‘sleep’ image: Robert Frost
(1874 – 1963) in Stopping
by the Woods on a Snowy Evening (1923), for example:
The woods are lovely,
dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
And William Butler
Yeats (1865 – 1939), in The
Second Coming (1921):
Now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Or Algernon Charles
Swinburne (1837 – 1909), in Hymn
to Proserpine (1866):
But love grows
bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.
Sleep, shall we sleep after all? for the world is not sweet
in the end;
For the old faiths loosen and fall, the new years ruin and rend.
Here is Percy Bysshe
Shelley (1792 – 1822), in The Indian Serenade (1819):
I arise from dreams
of thee
In the first sweet sleep of the night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright:
I arise from dreams of thee,
Ana spirit in my feet
Hath led me – who knows how?
To thy chamber window, Sweet!
And William Wordsworth
(1770 – 1850) in ‘The Great Ode’ Intimations
of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1807):
Our birth is but
a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
 Shakespeare
(1564 – 1616) had much to say about sleep. Perhaps the most memorable
lines come in Macbeth; in Act II, Scene II, Macbeth arrives
having slain Duncan, the King of Scotland, and says to Lady Macbeth:
Methought I heard
a voice cry ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth doth murder sleep,’ – the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
In the Bible, Proverbs
3: 24 has:
When thou liest
down, thou shalt not be afraid:
yea, thou shalt lie down, and thy sleep shall be sweet.
And then, in Ecclesiastes
4:12:
The sleep of a
laboring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much:
but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep.
In an earlier piece
in this series (June, 2002) our subject was
Lullabies; this is a stanza from Dream
Angus, by George Churchill (I still haven’t been able
to trace him!):
Dreams to sell,
fine dreams to sell,
Angus is coming with dreams to sell.
Hush now wee bairnie and sleep without fear,
For Angus will bring you a dream, my dear.
Nelson Algren (1909
– 1981) offered three laws for life that “a nice little old Negro
lady once taught him”; the third of these was:
And never, ever,
no matter what else you do in your life,
never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own.
Seems like a good
guideline to build a life around.
So, what shall we
choose for the poems of this week? I am going to choose the great
one from Shakespeare: Hamlet’s
soliloquy from Act III, Scene I, line 56:
To sleep: perchance
to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
Next, I am going to
select Alfred Edward Housman (1859 – 1936), from A Shropshire
Lad; I will choose the section from No. 4, Reveille.
Last, I am going
back to one of my favorite poets, Edward Estlin Cummings (1894
– 1962), and one of his earliest; published in Tulips and Chimneys
(1923), this one is called Doll’s
boy’s asleep.
Hope you like them
– and try and wake up before next week!
|
